Welcome to The Publisher Newsletter from MediaVoices. Over the coming weeks, we’ll be bringing you the best of the main stage sessions from The Publisher Summit, both in audio and writing.

Listen to the full panel by searching for ‘The Publisher Podcast’ on your pod app of choice, or if you prefer to read, our write-ups are delivered in each email (below) or online at voices.media.

Newsletter growth and engagement strategies from POLITICO, The Guardian and beehiiv

Newsletters have grown beyond being an extension of a publisher brand and surfacing web stories to being mini brands in their own right for some publishers. Some have even become flagship products, and major drivers to other areas of the business.

On a panel at The Publisher Summit, Kate Day, Senior Executive Editor (Europe) at POLITICO, Toby Moses, Head of Newsletters at The Guardian, and Jake MccGwire, Head of Product at beehiiv came together to discuss how newsletters can supercharge other areas of a publishing business.

Listen to the full session below, or search for ‘The Publisher Podcast’ wherever you listen to podcasts.

The panellists explored how to bring audiences deeper into an ecosystem from a flagship newsletter, the importance of owning that audience, and some of the challenges of growth and measurement. Here are some of the tips and strategies they shared on growing and engaging audiences with newsletters.

A quality audience

Quality over quantity was one of the key themes of The Publisher Summit, and this panel was no exception. A ruthless focus on quality audiences and journalism was the key to success for POLITICO, The Guardian, and many of the creators and publishers who use beehiiv’s email platform.

This ethos was embedded into the beginnings of POLITICO’s flagship policy and politics-focused Playbook newsletter. Before launch, Senior Executive Editor Kate Day explained that the team had manually written a list of 200 influential people who should read the newsletter. This included more ambitious targets like the Prime Minister, as well as key policymakers and decision makers.

“We hand-selected those 200 people, and we watched very closely both who was reading and how engaged they are,” Day said, sharing that she personally had coffee with sixty of the 200 targets before launching. This helped sign-ups, which were primarily word-of-mouth in the early days.

Since launching in 2017, the London Playbook newsletter has now amassed 95,000+ subscribers. But Day emphasised that although subscriber milestones are a boost for the team, what really makes it work as a product is who’s reading and how often: “Then you’ve got a sustained, engaged audience to build on for other things.”

Following the success of subsequent Playbook launches in Brussels (135k subscribers), Paris (45k subscribers) and Berlin (15k subscribers), Day’s team are gearing up to launch the Madrid Playbook later this month.

Day explained that in conversations with editors and reports on the Spanish team, she’s often been asked about subscriber numbers and goals. “I always care much more about the who than I do about the number,” she emphasised. “If you can get those few hundred right, in our case the wider ecosystem follows them because you’ve got the really powerful people. If they’re starting the day with your newsletter, then everybody trying to influence them will naturally flow in behind.”

The Guardian’s Head of Newsletters Toby Moses said that if he was to go on just numbers alone, the future of their gaming newsletter Pushing Buttons would be in question. But the level of reader interaction helps the newsletter punch above its weight. “It’s a smaller but very distinct audience from other lists,” he explained. “That’s really valuable, because reaching beyond our traditional ecosystem is the hardest bit.”

Similarly, their pop-up Taylor Swift newsletter, which ran during the nine months of her Eras tour, went well, but didn’t achieve the hundreds of thousands of subscribers Moses was targeting. Instead, he recognises the value in attracting an audience who aren’t traditional Guardian readers. “I don’t mind having a small list if I know that those 20,000 people are different readers than anything else,” he said.

Beehiiv’s Head of Product Jake MccGwire agreed that quality audiences are important. He added that from his experience, publishers need to have a clear idea of what model they’re building their newsletters around. “If you’re doing an ads model, you need to build in a specific way where you’re prioritising scale,” he explained. “If you’re building a subscription model, you need to think about upsell mechanisms.”

“People are really seeking out higher quality content. And to that end,  if you’re monetising it correctly, you don’t need a big audience. You just need a really engaged audience that adores whatever you’re creating.”

Navigating personalities and brands

For publishers looking to launch or refresh newsletters, having a clear link to the brand feels like an essential step. But MccGwire pointed out that this is less important than a strong voice. “What people seem to be engaging with most is products that are genuinely compelling… it’s more about the personality driving the content, whether that’s thought leadership or opinion pieces,”  he shared.

MccGwire highlighted The Nerve as an example of a publication which has been propelled to financial success by a cohort of distinct personalities and contributors. “You’ve got to have a relationship with your audience, the audience has to know who the journalists are and [you have to] show your workings,” co-founder Sarah Donaldson shared in an earlier session.

POLITICO’s Playbook newsletter was originally written by one journalist. But Day pointed out that this was difficult to sustain on a daily – and then twice daily – cadence, especially alongside other types of content production like podcasts. Now, the newsletter is compiled by a team, which Day said is “also great for the product because you can bring in slightly different source bases and perspectives, which can really strengthen the journalism.”

Getting the right balance therefore between having a distinctive voice and standardising has been something POLITICO has had to navigate. Day illustrated this with Emilio Casalicchio, London Playbook’s PM Editor. “[Emilio] has quite a distinct voice and people love that and really connect with it, so we don’t want to squash that into some kind of branded corporate voice,” she explained. “But we also don’t want an audience to feel as though their newsletter lurches around.”

It’s an ongoing discussion with the writers involved. Day said that authors now have a ‘Playbook’ version of themselves which allows personality, but with a level of consistency.

The Guardian has a similar line to tread with many individual newsletters under the larger umbrella. Moses encourages pushback from writers if they don’t like an idea, because the newsletter has to come from them. 

“[Writers] need to be at the heart, because we can’t do it without them. They are who the reader ultimately has that direct relationship with,” he emphasised.

Listen to the full session above or search ‘The Publisher Podcast’ on your podcast app to hear more, including POLITICO’s expansion of Playbook into live events, The Guardian’s continuation of a print brand in newsletter form, and Beehiiv’s top tips for measuring engaged audiences.

Good reads:

What The Guardian is doing to build robust recurring audience relationships and revenue

Falling traffic, AI summaries and unreliable social media referrals are pressuring publishers of all stripes. For the Guardian, with supporters delivering 45% of its revenue, direct relationships are the North Star.

MediaVoices • Peter Houston

Why podcast leader Goalhanger is investing in newsletters

Podcast powerhouse Goalhanger attracted more than 1.8 billion views and streams across its audio, video and social content in 2025. More than 250,000

Digital Content Next • Esther Kezia Thorpe – Media Reporter

Full programme: The Definitive AI Forum 2026

There’s still time to book for The Definitive AI Forum for Media, Information & Events 2026. Our AI media event of the year features 32 industry leaders from the UK, US and the EU on Wednesday 18 November.

Flashes & Flames • Colin Morrison

There is no subscription ceiling — there is a Web site ceiling

Case studies from the recent INMA Media Innovation Week in Madrid show there is no subscription ceiling, but a Web site ceiling is a different story.

International News Media Association (INMA)

Two 23-year-olds used AI to create a daily audio briefing. It’s now the top news app in Argentina.

"We want society to trust [media] again, and to give them a platform built around current consumption formats that reduces friction between society and verified information."

Nieman Lab

Poking sleeping dragons: the FT’s Marie Goddard shares how to prepare for new subscription legislation

New UK subscription laws require publishers to enhance transparency and customer engagement. Learn how to adapt and prepare for these changes effectively.

www.ftstrategies.com/en-gb/insights/how-to-prepare-for-new-subscription-legislation

How Reuters’ dynamic paywall is boosting subscriptions and ads

Reuters’ dynamic paywall is helping the publisher grow subscriptions while strengthening (rather than cannibalizing) its ads business.

Digiday • Sara Guaglione

Financial Times bucks trend with 9% growth in paying print readers

The Financial Times saw another strong year in 2025, capped off by growth in what these days makes for an unexpected area: print circulation.

A Media Operator • Bron Maher

Welcome to The Publisher Newsletter from MediaVoices. Over the coming weeks, we’ll be bringing you the best of the main stage sessions from The Publisher Summit, both in audio and writing.

Listen to the full interview by searching for ‘The Publisher Podcast’ on your pod app of choice, or if you prefer to read, our write-ups are delivered in each email (below) or online at voices.media.

What The Guardian is doing to build robust recurring audience relationships and revenue

The struggle is real: falling traffic, AI summaries and unreliable social media referrals are pressuring publishers of all stripes. For many, building direct audiences is a key goal. For the Guardian, with supporters delivering 45% of its revenue, direct relationships are the North Star. 

Liz Wynn, Chief Supporter Revenue Officer at The Guardian, joined us at The Publisher Summit in London to talk about how she has helped secure 1.4 million recurring supporters for the paper. Interviewed by Craig Llewelyn-Williams, SVP for Customer Strategy at Woodwing, Wynn emphasised the importance of direct connections, and shared how the Guardian’s product strategy supports those relationships. 

You can listen to the full session below, or by searching for ‘The Publisher Podcast’ wherever you find podcasts.

No billionaire bailouts

As The Guardian’s Chief Supporter Revenue Officer, Wynn is essentially the brand’s chief marketing and customer commercial officer, responsible for marketing and direct consumer revenues globally across The Guardian’s print and digital products.

Owned by an independent trust, The Guardian has never been able to call on billionaire owners to bail it out. “We’re now two-thirds funded by our readers across our products, but if you wind back 10 years ago, we were in very well-documented dire straits.”

Wynn explained that, losing £100 million a year and faced with the prospect of closing, editor-in-chief Katherine Viner together with then CEO David Pemsel, landed on ‘quite a novel’ method of driving revenue. “They recognised that the promised sunny uplands of advertising-funded, reach-driven digital news really wasn’t going to transpire, and they needed another revenue source to offset the structural decline in print.”

Their ‘novel’ solution was the supporter model, founded initially on reader donations, to secure The Guardian’s ‘open to all, funded by many, beholden to no one’ ethos. Wynn said: “Lots of people were very sceptical internally and externally, but it did start to work.”

Globally, digital reader funding is now 45% of The Guardian’s turnover, representing a 30% uplift in revenues over 10 years. “It hasn’t always been linear progress,” said Wynn, “Particularly in the last three years. Although the donation aspect is very famous, more than 100% of our revenue growth has actually come from subscription products.”

Subscription success

The Guardian’s direct subscription is a metered premium product that gives subscribers unlimited ad-free reading through its primary app, plus access to its bundled Feast recipe app. Wynn said when the Guardian’s product development team talks about revenue strategy, they focus on three things.

The first – foundational – pillar is driving motivation to support. “That’s all about the distinctiveness of our brand,” explained Wynn. “It is extremely reassuring to know that when we survey folks on the site, 99% of them can correctly identify that we’re not funded by a billionaire.”

She said that is the consequence of consistent brand work over years, speaking directly to ‘the DNA’ of the organisation. “We do a lot of work there, together with editorial, and you’ll see that in our messaging and our broader brand marketing work.”

Wynn acknowledged that emotional connections alone are not enough to drive conversion, and therefore the second factor The Guardian’s product development team considers is direct audience connection to build habits on its platforms. “We have a very sophisticated email programme – newsletters and registration strategies – which has led to a dramatic expansion in our direct marketable audience,” she explained.

That marketable audience has grown from less than a million about two years ago to more than 8 million, globally. Wynn said: “We see a direct correlation between the number of visits, the number of sessions in a month, and propensity to convert to be a supporter. The more often someone visits, the more often they convert. It’s so intuitive.”

The third thing that the team considers is that potential subscribers understand The Guardian’s mission, but also see utility in what the paper has to offer at the point they are ready to subscribe.

“It does make a material difference whether someone chooses to give a single contribution or if they choose to support us via one of our premium subscriptions,” Wynn said. “If you go onto the site and give a single contribution, that’s amazing, it’s wonderful, hundreds of thousands of people do it every year. But frankly, when we evaluate the lifetime value (LTV) over three years of that transaction, we get more than 10 times more if somebody takes our all-access digital product.”

Building better subscriber benefits 

Wynn said there are lots of interesting commercial aspects to how The Guardian packages up its donation and subscription offers side by side. She explained that the overwhelming motivation of all supporters, subscribers or donors, is to ensure the survival of The Guardian.

However, beyond better LTV, Wynn highlighted clear long-term advantages in building subscription revenues.

With donations, given freely for no direct benefit beyond the Guardian’s journalism, she said product development can be ‘quite constrained’. In contrast, subscriptions facilitate the continual evolution of the product. “You can add benefits and over time, as inflation takes its toll, you can make sure that the pricing of that subscription adjusts. It increases over time and you get an awful lot better retention.”

When it comes to product development, Wynn said a blend of editorial, commercial and product thinking is crucial.  “We spend quite a lot of time thinking up new ideas… and trying to filter out which ones are really going to move the needle. We’re not a huge team at all, like a fraction of the size of the New York Times Puzzles team. We’re trying all the time to look for that magical balance of simplicity and focus on big bets and big ideas.”

The supporter revenue strategy helps organise priorities against The Guardian’s broader North Star Goals and Wynn said daily audience is the first core metric to consider, both on and off platform. “On platform is very valuable to us, but we need to sustain reach and the ecosystem is evolving constantly,” she explained. The second is centred on direct community and how registration details are gathered; the third is the number of supporters.

“Those are the goals that we’ve landed on. They focus essentially on audience, which is the intersection for all of us, whether we’re in advertising, editorial, or commercial. Life’s not so straightforward for us that we have one goal, but I think that is a very helpful framework. Is it going to move the dial on any of those three things? If it’s not, why are we doing it?”

International expansion has played a big part in The Guardian’s supporter revenue growth, with audiences in Europe, Australia and the US all growing over the last three years. “That  has been based on the product work we’ve done, and the direct audience work we’ve done,” said Wynn.

In the global context, Wynn described supporter revenue as ‘phenomenal’ because it is scalable and simple. 

“It works wherever you read the journalism. It’s essentially the same experience, the same product, the same commercial logic. Where we focus our effort in terms of customisation is all on the last mile localisation. It’s all about the relevance of the messaging. It’s all about ensuring that it speaks to the audience where they are.”

Listen to the full episode in this week’s episode of The Publisher Podcast, available wherever you find podcasts.

Good reads:

How The Times, Telegraph and Hearst are prioritising quality over quantity for long-term, sustainable audience growth

As pressures on traffic and discovery grow, coupled with the bombardment of AI ‘slop’, there is an opportunity for publishers to lean into a true quality over quantity ethos and reap the benefits. But what does this look like in practice?

MediaVoices • Esther Kezia Thorpe

Revenge of the Apps

Amid the existential Google Zero era, some publications are trying to reclaim the direct relationship with their audiences via… apps. But can they mimic ‘The New York Times’ digital success with its scale?

Puck • Julia Alexander

35 questions Italian journalists still ask about AIs (and the ones their publishers should answer)

What two and a half years of training rooms reveal about Italian newsrooms: the rules now exist, the tools are everywhere, and the decisions that matter are still waiting for someone to take them.

The Fix

Engage, explain and empower: The Local Sweden's audience strategy during election season

Instead of going on its own assumptions, this publication for foreign residents asked readers to shape their election coverage - and the responses changed everything

Journalism UK

Paywall violation ‘eviscerates’ fair use defense: What OpenAI-NYT twist means for publishers

The unsealed material could set a precedent that fuels more lawsuits against AI firms and strengthens publishers hand in licensing talks.

Digiday • Jessica Davies, Sara Guaglione

Economist video strategy: 'We did 50 pilot shows before launching Insider'

Publisher recorded 50 pilot shows ahead of the launch of its premium video and newsletter strand Insider.

Press Gazette • Charlotte Tobitt

This guest article by Adriana Whiteley, Director of FT Strategies was first published on Flashes & Flames: The Global Media Business Weekly.

Adriana draws on the firm’s “Resilient Content Businesses in the Age of AI” series. She is a participant in The Definitive AI Forum for Media, Information & Events 2026 and here poses vital questions for traditional media as GenAI turns information into content – and content itself into utility.

Are you still a publisher if you don’t publish?

For two centuries, the publisher’s job was to stand between people who knew things and people who wanted to know them. Generative AI moves the value away from that middleman role and towards the two ends of the chain: the proprietary information and expertise from which answers are derived, and the interfaces that sit closest to the user when those answers are delivered.

Our resilience testing across the archives of B2B and B2C publishers shows that much of what a typical title produces – and sometimes most of it – can already be replicated by decent prompting and a fact-check.

AI drives competition from both supply and demand

On the supply side, AI reduces the cost and the skill needed to produce competent content at scale, enabling automation of much of what fills B2B publications today: update-type news from official sources, press-release reworkings, evergreen explainers.

That expands the competitive set. Every brand, consultancy, trade body and specialist AI application can now produce a passable explainer or industry briefing. For many, content is just a marketing cost. Publishers are therefore competing for attention and talent with organisations that do not need to monetise their outputs.

On the demand side, users can increasingly aggregate and summarise content themselves. Corporate users, or the agents acting on their behalf, can go straight to primary sources such as regulatory filings and corporate announcements, then combine, personalise and contextualise them against internal proprietary data. A job that used to be performed by an article can now be done by data feeding directly into an internal process, with no publication in between.

Buy tickets – The Definitive AI Forum for Media, Information & Events 2026

Use the code MV50 for £50 off the ticket price.

www.tickettailor.com/events/flashesflames/2227417

If AI can write the article, what’s the editor for?

AI can increasingly replace one of publishing’s traditional editorial functions: turning facts into readable text. But it does not remove the effort of establishing those facts through original reporting, validation and curation.

Some of this work will remain “artisanal”: cultivating relationships with human sources, deciding what is important, or finding creative ways to present complex information. Other functions will become more “industrial”, focused on defining rules to codify style and output formats, establishing processes for validating and normalising data, and setting the parameters within which AI systems operate.

A journalist might develop sources and uncover information about a company that is not available elsewhere. But once the facts have been verified and organised, AI can adapt the raw material to different needs and audiences. The same content can generate a news story, a company briefing, a chart, an audio summary, an explainer video or an alert,   according to editorially defined rules. The editor still decides which information can be trusted, how it should be interpreted and how machines are allowed to use it.

This is likely to create more hybrid editorial, product and data roles. A few newsrooms are already writing job descriptions for “prompt editors”, responsible for defining how systems turn underlying data into different products and formats.

As production becomes automated, editorial accountability itself can become part of the product, especially when information feeds directly into corporate decisions, or where provenance has economic value – when a claim must be traceable to an authoritative source in a regulatory report, say.

Value migrates from the output to the information underneath it.

Content as a data derivative

Content providers often overvalue their finished products – the articles, the reports, the newsletters – and undervalue the information that enables them. Interview notes, archives, user comments, conference transcripts and even sales calls are potentially valuable data assets. This information is rarely captured systematically or structured. It is usually organised according to the teams that created it, and scattered across CMS and CRM platforms, event teams, research databases and individual employees’ notes.

AI can produce more content from these assets, but it can also combine them into products with greater utility and, potentially, predictive value. A specialist publisher might use them, alongside company announcements and usage patterns, to identify emerging themes or alert customers to developments in the markets they follow.

This changes what it means to build a valuable content asset. The finished article becomes one derivative of an underlying body of structured, proprietary and trustworthy information; the same body might also generate a benchmark, a dataset, an alert or a research tool. Publishers therefore need to become much more disciplined about capturing information systematically, validating it, structuring it consistently and documenting where it came from.

Getting closer to the decision

Generating proprietary information is only one side of the opportunity. AI is also enabling higher utility.

Publishers have traditionally delivered information and left the user to decide what to do with it. A regulatory newsletter tells a compliance officer what has changed; the compliance officer then has to determine how it matters to their company and if any action is needed.

AI allows information products to move further into that decision. Instead of summarising new regulation, a product might identify the changes relevant to a particular company, compare them with its existing policies, flag the documents that need updating and alert the employees responsible.

Not every publisher needs to build software or embed itself in every customer’s operations. But it is important to think about how information is delivered and how it can be combined with contextualising data, so that it evolves from reporting what happened to triggering action.

So: are you still a publisher if you don’t publish? Possibly not, and maybe it doesn’t matter. The businesses best positioned to succeed have stopped treating publication as the product. They look more like proprietary information infrastructure, with events, benchmarks, alerts and APIs sitting alongside the editorial that feeds them. Publishing becomes one of many outputs of these operations.

5 questions for your next board meeting

1. How much of our revenue depends on resilient content? If non-branded search referrals fell by half next year, which products would survive?

2. What is our competitive differentiation? What are we known for, and which audiences can we serve?

3. Which products are embedded in a customer’s workflow? How can they be integrated more deeply either through product development or partnerships?

4. What data do we generate that nobody has yet thought to collect, and what would it be worth to someone else?

5. What are we going to stop doing so we can focus on increasing our strategic resilience?

Adriana Whiteley, Director, FT Strategies

Buy tickets – The Definitive AI Forum for Media, Information & Events 2026

The event features 32 CEOs and industry leaders on-stage (including Adriana Whiteley). Use the code MV50 for £50 off the ticket price.

www.tickettailor.com/events/flashesflames/2227417

Good reads:

How The Times, Telegraph and Hearst are prioritising quality over quantity for long-term, sustainable audience growth

As pressures on traffic and discovery grow, coupled with the bombardment of AI ‘slop’, there is an opportunity for publishers to lean into a true quality over quantity ethos and reap the benefits. But what does this look like in practice?

MediaVoices • Esther Kezia Thorpe

The link economy breaks

Traffic to news sites is plummeting in the U.S. as tech giants steer people away from search and toward AI.

www.axios.com/newsletters/axios-media-trends-6644c760-b692-11f1-80a0-47b98c6893e5.html?chunk=1&

Which publisher pages does AI cite when judging a news brand?

AI does not appear to judge a publisher from one definitive page. It assembles different evidence depending on the question. Evidence from 4,003 AI answers and 20,016 citations

Steven Wilson-Beales

Axios preps new Axios Direct feeds for AI models, agents as revenue tops 2026 goal

Axios has reached its revenue goal for 2026. Now the news publisher is building a new revenue stream to keep up the pace in 2027 and beyond.

Digiday • Tim Peterson

Publisher app strategies: Product team capacity is main blocker

50% of publishers say product team capacity is their number one blocker to progress. But 80% said apps will be “very” important to their business over the next 12 months.

Press Gazette • Freddy Mayhew

Do you have enough recurring value to launch subscriptions? The questions to ask yourself

Subscription fatigue is the easy explanation when a paid product struggles. The more useful question is whether there was enough recurring value to begin with.

Audiencers • Jonathan Gupta-Buckley

Five independent climate journalists are teaming up with a “pop-up newsroom”

“When major publications all report on the same thing, it elevates a topic and it gets more attention. So we decided to do the same thing and swarm-report on housing.”

Nieman Lab

Welcome to The Publisher Newsletter from MediaVoices. Over the coming weeks, we’ll be bringing you the best of the main stage sessions from The Publisher Summit, both in audio and writing.

Listen to the full panel by searching for ‘The Publisher Podcast’ on your pod app of choice, or if you prefer to read, our write-ups are delivered in each email (below) or online at voices.media.

How The Times, Telegraph and Hearst are prioritising quality over quantity for long-term, sustainable audience growth

As pressures on traffic and discovery grow, coupled with the bombardment of AI ‘slop’, there is an opportunity for publishers to lean into a true quality over quantity ethos and reap the benefits. But what does this look like in practice?

At The Publisher Summit in London, we were joined by Maire Bonheim, Head of Newsletters at The Telegraph, Malcolm Coles, Audience Growth Director at Hearst UK, and Anna Sbuttoni, Deputy Head of Digital at The Times and Sunday Times on a panel moderated by Press Gazette’s Charlotte Tobitt.

The panel shared how actively embracing publishing fewer but higher-quality articles and newsletters has had a measurable impact on audience growth, conversion, and subscriber retention. You can listen to the full session below, or by searching for ‘The Publisher Podcast’ wherever you find podcasts.

‘Fewer, better stories’ at The Times

British daily newspaper publisher The Times and Sunday Times has a strong digital presence, with 84% of subscribers reading online-only, according to Deputy Head of Digital Anna Sbuttoni. In 2024, the brand had a full content audit of stories, looking at what people were and weren’t reading.

“We realised that a quarter of the stories we were publishing across the whole site had under 2,000 subscribers or guest visitors,” Sbuttoni told The Publisher Summit audience. The audience team spent a lot of time questioning what was being published, what was working and what wasn’t, including research with a reader panel of 12,000 Times subscribers alongside a broader survey.

This formed the backbone of a new ‘fewer, better stories’ strategy, which came into force in late 2025. The news desk were publishing over 200 stories, which has now been cut to 160. The majority of stories cut were ones Sbuttoni described as ‘one-fact’ stories, incremental updates, and stories that could be found anywhere else.

To help the journalists see the outcomes of this strategy, they built a tracker to visualise the results. This is now the Times Editorial Datum (TED) which has iterated through various versions, and now shows story count, page views and engagement data like subscriber engaged minutes. Sbuttoni described that they’ve also introduced a ‘Quality Read Score’ – the percentage of subscribers who made it at least halfway through an article. This is an important reality check for editors about how much people are really reading, given that 70% of subscriber reading takes place in the app on mobile devices.

“We were able to track week to week as we were publishing fewer stories, that those stories were actually making more impact, and our page views were going up,” she explained, noting the rapid positive improvement for traffic and engagement.

The story cuts and the impact of them has been felt differently across various desks. Sbuttoni highlighted the sports desk, which ended up cutting around 30% of the number of stories they produce – one of the highest proportions. But their traffic is now up “nearly 50% year on year.”

The Times has now had four consecutive months of “all-time record traffic growth”. But Sbuttoni was keen to emphasise that the conversation in the newsroom has moved away from traffic. Daily habit is now the ‘North Star’, with journalists more interested in engagement data than hits. 

“All of this focus on the numbers was really just the mechanism to talk about quality: what reaches the bar that we should expect from The Times, and what’s really worth paying for?” Sbuttoni outlined.

She highlighted one example of an article produced by Environment Editor Adam Vaughan about how Britain quit coal for electricity generation. The piece was very visual, with archive clips, imagery and in-depth reporting, and turned into the most-read story of the day.

Vaughan messaged Sbuttoni later to say that without the ‘fewer, better stories’ approach, he’d have published a one-fact story about the end of coal day. But the new mindset had resulted in a top-performing piece. 

“It really changed the mindset in the newsroom. Reporters are really thinking, what should I invest my time in?,” Sbuttoni concluded. “Do I need to file every turn of a story, or can I actually step back and bring something that’s much more high value?”

Showing what works at Hearst

Like The Times, consumer media company Hearst UK also underwent a content review in order to give their editors a chance to concentrate on more successful articles. They too needed solid data in order to formulate a successful strategy. “We found it very hard to get data on what was working and what wasn’t, because we never really understood why an article was being written,” Audience Growth Director Malcolm Coles told The Publisher Summit.

Coles shared that they had a minimum target of 1,000 page views. But depending on the brand, anything from 20% to 70% of articles didn’t meet that threshold.

He started off with a giant spreadsheet, where journalists and editors had to explain the reasons for publishing something. “If you want to pitch an article at the daily conference, you have to write your suggested headline in the spreadsheet, why you’re publishing it, and where you think it’s going to get traffic – SEO, Discover, social, whatever,” Coles explained. 

“The discipline of doing that, and the fact that we could get much better data about why we were doing articles and where they were expected to do traffic…meant that we had much better data.”

This wasn’t designed to be a burden on writers, but instead to identify where the audience team could help. Coles highlighted cases where someone thought they were writing for SEO but actually getting Discover traffic, in which case headline writing should be approached very differently. It also gave editors visibility over what proportion of content was being written for traffic versus membership or newsletters.

The spreadsheet has now gone through several evolutions. It now has around 8 columns a journalist needs to fill in to get something published. “It doesn’t actually take very long, despite the horrendous-sounding nature of it, but it means we can present back to them much better data on what works and what doesn’t,” Coles smiled. “Traffic went up and the number of articles went down, so, success!”

Alongside the spreadsheet, the audience team changed when they sent the daily statistics report. Moving it from late morning to 9am is a simple change, but Coles noted it meant the teams had it in time for the daily editorial stand-up, so people could discuss what had gone well the day before to inform that day.

Coles has also been experimenting with AI to analyse headlines and offer suggestions for improvement. “We were able to show that ‘withholding’ headlines had lower engagement time because people would click through then click off again,” he said, noting that this defied conventional wisdom.  “But if you were much clearer in your headline about what the interesting thing about your story was, people would spend more time with what you’d created.”

Across Hearst UK’s brands, traffic is now up 100% year on year. Coles noted that the number of web articles has gone down, but they have found better ways of using a journalist’s time, such as writing member newsletters, so actual output is similar. They have also been rewarded with strong newsletter growth.

“By doing less, what we’re doing is more effective, and that means we’ve freed up time to do other important things – communicating with members, member-only newsletters – and everyone’s happier,” Coles explained, emphasising the membership focus of Hearst. “People can see that the work they’re doing has a much greater impact.”

Crucially though, the spreadsheets and monitoring is not designed to eradicate editorial instinct, but rather provide pointers and guidance. Coles gave an example of a Good Housekeeping story titled ‘What? I can’t have porridge for breakfast?’ which broke all the guidelines about writing for Google Discover, but reached over 8 million people.

“We’re not trying to drive creativity out,” he emphasised. “We’re just trying to put some guardrails in and go, if you do this sort of thing, it tends to be [more or less] successful.”

Honing The Telegraph’s newsletter portfolio

The Telegraph, a British broadsheet newspaper, was the final publication featured on the panel. Like The Times and Hearst UK, The Telegraph underwent a similar focus on quality, but specifically applied to their newsletter portfolio.

Maire Bonheim, The Telegraph’s Head of Newsletters outlined their 18-month project of honing their newsletter portfolio down from 40 at the start of 2025 to just 26. A number were discontinued entirely, with the remaining being revamped and improved to focus on content quality and improved visuals.

“We started off looking at the performance of every single newsletter – not just the audience size, but the engagement and the purpose of each newsletter, and how it was performing based on those metrics,” Bonheim explained. 

She pointed out that newsletters in the past were seen as promotional and traffic-driving channels, but this has changed in recent years: “We now see newsletters as pieces of journalism which should provide quality within the inbox in their own right.”

That’s not to say there’s not room for newsletters with a traffic-driving purpose. Cables, an international news and foreign affairs newsletter run by the foreign desk includes bespoke content and a column from a journalist as well as an aggregation of links to the site. 

“It’s actually one of our best-performing newsletters…especially in terms of subscriber engagement,” Bonheim said. 

She explained that the newsbrand used to have a mindset of each editorial desk having its own newsletter. “But that’s not actually the way the world works – it’s more about reader interests,” she pointed out. Now, some of the most popular newsletters come from desks working together to create a stronger product, such as the Royal Appointment newsletter which has contributions from the Fashion team.

As part of the quality focus, the team launched a new newsletter in 2025 called From the Editor, designed to be a new flagship for the brand.  “The purpose of that has been to focus on the quality, create habit and keep readers coming back,” said Bonheim, as well as build brand loyalty and journalist recognition. 

Everyone who registers for a free account on The Telegraph is automatically subscribed to the newsletter. It’s a bold strategy but one that is paying off – a year after launch, From the Editor has become their biggest source of new paying subscribers. 

Bonheim said that they use open rates – minus the Apple Mail audience – to track performance, as well as comparing day-to-day engagement like growth, clicks where relevant, and opens over time. There are also ‘softer’ methods of measuring success. “We can tell when a newsletter has been really popular… because we get hundreds of reader emails coming through, and it’s often not on what you’d expect, it’s the jam-versus-cream scone debate, for example,” she explained.

Since implementing the strategy, a number of newsletters have doubled their open rates. It’s not all bad news for the newsletters which ended up discontinued either. Bonheim said she saw desks coming back with pitches for stronger offerings, some of which have now been launched. The Telegraph’s portfolio has grown again, now standing at 32 newsletters. 

Quality as a differentiator

The economics of digital publishing have favoured volume and viral hits for the best part of a decade. Weaning off those sources of revenue isn’t easy. But these three publishers have demonstrated that shifting mindsets can result in not just higher quality audiences, but traffic growth.

“When volume becomes worthless, quality is a differentiator,” said Qwoted’s Chief Strategy Officer Beth Ashton, in a timely panel introduction. “The one thing that AI slop cannot replace is a direct, trusted relationship with an audience – people who choose you, who open the newsletter, who download the podcast, who renew the subscription, because what you make is worth their time.”

Listen to the full episode in this week’s episode of The Publisher Podcast, available wherever you find podcasts.

Good reads:

Good Housekeeping MD Liz Settle: “This is the best time to work in magazines since the early noughties”

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Welcome to The Publisher Newsletter from MediaVoices. Over the coming weeks, we’ll be bringing you the best of the main stage sessions from The Publisher Summit, both in audio and writing.

Listen to the full interview by searching for ‘The Publisher Podcast’ on your pod app of choice, or if you prefer to read, our write-ups are delivered in each email (below) or online at voices.media.

Good Housekeeping MD Liz Settle: “This is the best time to work in magazines since the early noughties”

Liz Settle joined Hearst UK’s Good Housekeeping magazine in 2023 and over the last three years, she’s changed a lot at the 104-year old brand. Last year was a great year for the magazine and looking ahead, she believes the tides are turning in our favour. “AI is driving people to our brands, not away from them,” she says.

Good Housekeeping MD Liz Settle was in a great mood when she joined me on stage for the opening interview of this year’s Publisher Summit.

She cheerfully told me that the 104-year old magazine she manages had its best year ever in 2025. It posted its highest ever revenue, seeing double digit growth on digital and print advertising, and increases in subscription and newsstand revenues.

And a couple of weeks before, GH had won Brand of the Year at the PPA awards. Settle explained that the last time she was up for a PPA award she’d been pipped at the post by Peppa Pig magazine. “I was absolutely livid about it, so I feel finally vindicated.”

All of that might explain the buoyant mood,  but it felt like there was more to it than a strong year and beating everyone’s favourite piglet. So I asked her why, when we’re more used to doom and gloom in the magazine business, she was so upbeat?

She listed three things.

Number one: “We have cool jobs. It’s still the funnest way to make a living.”

Number two: “I love my customers. They’re brilliant to hang out with. I think that’s why we’ve designed a product set that involves meeting our customers a lot. They come into the event space in the kitchen twice a month, we hang out, we have book clubs, we drink wine, we enjoy each other’s company. I think that really matters. I think it really makes a difference.”

Number three: “I genuinely believe that this is the best time to work in ‘the artist formerly known as’ magazines since the early noughties.”

The first two got an easy pass – working in magazine publishing can be a lot of fun and hanging out with readers is a big part of that. But while I probably agree that now is the best time in a long time to be in magazines, that third answer needed some unpacking. 

“I may have taken mind-altering drugs to make me think this, but I genuinely believe that the tides are turning in our favour if we choose to see it that way,” she started. 

Leaning into magazine media’s strengths

Settle has been working in magazines since the late 90s and fondly remembers the ‘glory days’ of fancy editorial conferences, spa days and open bars. “That’s not coming back, but  there are ways that you can win. You just have to seek them out.” 

Central to Settle’s excitement for the future of magazines is Hearst’s own  data that shows trust in magazine brands is rising at the same time it is ‘dropping off a cliff’ for social media platforms. “Nobody ever saw ‘As seen on Instagram’ on an advert. They say ‘As seen in Esquire’, ‘As seen in Elle’.”

She acknowledges that when it comes to advertising, magazines can’t compete directly with the platforms. 

“That’s not a winnable game – we can’t win on reach, we can’t win on speed, we can’t win on convenience to trade with, we can’t win on precision targeting. We can win client-direct, small slices of big budgets are really material to us.”

Settle said, at a time when ‘Google doesn’t love us any more’, relationships really matter: “And the really good news is – and I really believe this – Chief Marketing Officers and Marketing Directors are sick of performance marketing. They are bored. They want to work with people who can make something magical, that adds up to greater than the sum of its parts. We as publishers and brand owners are uniquely positioned to still do that. Everything is flowing in our favour.”

On the reader side, from rising consumer interest in real-world experiences to being the AI antidote, magazine publishers have an opportunity to compete. “All of the stuff about AI is driving people to our brands, not away from them.”

The secret of Good Housekeeping’s success

Settle commiserated with publishers that have spent years chasing ‘dirty traffic’ or ‘cheap revenue’.  She said: “if you have neglected your brand’s unique tone of voice, positioning, and quality… I’m sorry about that, you’ve made it hard for yourself.”

She explained that the secret of the success GH saw in 2025 and beyond is to believe in your brand and know your customers well enough to tap into their willingness to spend on ‘the feeling of belonging’.  “They are keener than ever to find places where they can connect with people who are into the same stuff as they are. The world is designed to keep them apart; I think we are well placed to counteract that.”

This is a fundamental principle of magazine publishing for Settle. “That’s what we used to do in the old days,” she said, “That’s always been our business, we just need to remember how.” She put a positive spin on the state of magazine publishing, saying we need “PR not ER”. For her, belief in the business is key, particularly the belief that it’s possible to win.

“I have a brilliant CEO, Katie Vanneck-Smith, and she is made of belief. Losing is not a thing she’s really into, so we believe we can do it by sheer bloody-mindedness.”

Part of that belief is understanding that perfectionism is pointless.

“Don’t wait till it’s perfect, launch it, have a go. I’m not here to tell you that everything we’ve tried has been successful; it hasn’t, and we have had really difficult trading months, and stuff has gone wrong. But if you’ve got enough bets on something, one is going to stick, and you only need one line to turn green for people to suddenly have their heads up, and they’re like, actually, look, we’re winning.”

Another part of it is paying attention to the bottom line. Since Settle joined GH in 2023, she has made changes to personnel, positioning and the magazine’s product line up.  She said that people might think of GH  as a big brand with tons of cash to throw around. “That’s not true; cost discipline was a big part of the guardrails put in place with what we tried to do.”

One of 2025’s innovations was a Christmas TV Guide, published in print. “In the old days, it would take a year-and-a-half and you’d spend a bazillion pounds. We just sort of did it.

“I think now, as publishers, we can do things on the cheap. We’ve been poor for a long time, we’re good at this now. So I think that we keep the stakes low, and then when the wins come, it’s better.”

Listen to the full episode in this week’s episode of The Publisher Podcast, available wherever you find podcasts.

Good reads:

News start-up The Nerve “really close” to sustainability as first birthday approaches

The Nerve is preparing to celebrate a year since launch with special events, and even a print magazine. Co-founder Sarah Donaldson shares why they’ve seen such early success.

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Welcome back to the start of our next season - hope you had a brilliant summer! Over the coming weeks, we’ll be bringing you the best of the main stage sessions from The Publisher Summit, both in audio and writing.

Listen to the full interview by searching for ‘The Publisher Podcast’ on your pod app of choice, or if you prefer to read, our write-ups are delivered in full in each email (below) or online at voices.media.

There’s a bit of a twist this week though as the audio isn’t direct from the Summit. We scheduled a 20 minute interview slot on stage with Sarah and barely scratched the surface of what we wanted to discuss as it’s such a fascinating case study, so we caught up with her again over the summer as The Nerve nears its first birthday for an extended interview.

News start-up The Nerve “really close” to sustainability as first birthday approaches

Newsletter-first news start-up The Nerve is preparing to celebrate a year since launch with special events, and even a print magazine. Co-founder Sarah Donaldson shares why they’ve seen such early success, the upcoming launch of a print ‘zine, and how the brand is on the brink of financial sustainability.

The Nerve was launched in September 2025 by a group of five former Observer journalists; Carole Cadwalladr, Lynsey Irvine, Sarah Donaldson, Jane Ferguson and Imogen Carter. All previously worked together at the Observer, and came together to launch the newsbrand after the Observer’s controversial sale to Tortoise Media in April 2025.

Donaldson joined The Publisher Podcast this week to expand on her session at The Publisher Summit earlier this year about the opportunities the women spotted to launch a news and culture brand, which audience touchpoints they decided to focus on, and why The Nerve has resonated strongly so early on.  

When news of the Observer’s proposed sale was shared with staff in September 2024,  a group of the paper’s  journalists came together to propose some alternative strategies. This gave them vital insight into the media landscape, and what to do if setting something up from scratch.

“The whole process of the Observer leaving the Guardian…was a very useful exercise if you’re going to be setting up a new journalistic project, because we all spent a lot of time thinking what the future of the Observer would be if the journalists had had more input into the plans,” Donaldson said, explaining that much of the legwork for a digital-first brand had been done before the sale.

“It [feels] like this is a very significant moment for news journalism. You can see with all the big brands pivoting to video, SEO’s collapsed, the business model we’ve all been operating on for the past decade or so is just completely changing, and the strategy at the Observer didn’t really reflect that.” 

The news landscape may be very well served, but Donaldson noted that it’s also an important moment for independent journalism, with diminishing trust – for good and bad reasons – across ‘mainstream’ media brands. As part of this, she acknowledged they couldn’t simply launch a news brand that repackaged and commented on stories.

“We really thought that there was an opening for a brand that really focused on investigations around very, very few key topics, the ones which are clearly the most important and consequential, and to still mix it with culture,” she outlined.

Approaching financial sustainability after early success

The Nerve launched as a free-to-read newsletter-first publication on 30th September 2025 from a fringe event at the Labour Party conference. They describe their beat as culture, politics and technology, believing that strong culture coverage is key to understanding an increasingly chaotic world.  

Despite the journalism being available to read without a paywall, people flocked to support The Nerve financially. In less than a week after launching, it had hit 8,000 sign-ups and more than 1,000 paying members, operating a voluntary donation scheme. 

Members can pay £6.95 monthly or £68 annually. There is also a ‘Founder Member’ tier for those who wish to give extra support for £250 a year. “We’ve got over 400 people who have given us £250 a year, which is really extraordinary,” Donaldson commented.

Donaldson declined to share current subscriber figures, but said that sustainability was within reach. “We’re really close to being sustainable for the model that we’ve got now and the outgoings we’re covering now,” she shared. “With a couple of tweaks, we’re sustainable now.”

The brand also boasts a strong conversion rate, with Donaldson sharing that the percentage of free newsletter subscribers that convert to paid membership has consistently remained around 13%; far higher than industry averages. This was initially dismissed as early interest, but has sustained over the first year. 

Although the early success took the team by surprise, Donaldson speculated that many of the headlines around the Observer sale and strikes had garnered some sympathy for their cause. This meant people were following what happened next, and were clearly willing to support a new, independent outlet.

It also helped that the founding team, led by Carole Cadwalladr, had played a key role in exposing the Cambridge Analytica and Facebook data scandal in 2018; a pivotal moment in the global public’s perception of Big Tech and social media.

Cadwalladr herself has a substantial online following of those interested in her investigative work. “Carole is really good at translating something that’s quite dry and technical into a story that people can really understand, and she’s continued to dig into that stuff ever since,” Donaldson explained. “So when we launched, there was a ready audience for what we were doing”

Donaldson said that ironically, the successful launch put a lot more early pressure on the team than anticipated, as strong reporting needed to follow very quickly. “But we’ve continued to grow really steadily with a few big spikes around investigations that we’ve done,” she shared.

The financial boost meant they could expand their network of contributors and columnists far earlier than anticipated. Columnists include Deborah Frances-White, Cory Doctorow and Sangita Myska, alongside prominent contributing editors from Adjoa Andoh to Carol Vorderman and Michael Sheen.

A newsletter-first model

There were two other trends which Donaldson credits the success of The Nerve to. First is the availability and ease of platforms to launch editorially-led newsletters. Using Beehiiv, the team were able to create a bold, slick newsletter design which published to a website as well as to inboxes, alongside integrated tools for member payments. This is something that even a few years ago would have required multiple platforms.

But it is also more apparent than ever how much personalities and voices in journalism matter. “You’ve got to have a relationship with your audience, the audience has to know who the journalists are and [you have to] show your workings,” Donaldson highlighted.

The Nerve encourages direct communication with audiences through the newsletter. “They can just reply to the email… It’s very different to the old Guardian/Observer site where all the interaction with the reader is below the line, under the journalism.”

Crucially though, being newsletter-first has paved the way to fast sustainability for an outlet able to remain lean. “You don’t need to spend millions,” Donaldson emphasised. “We’ve proved we can deliver our journalism in a very low-cost way. It’s very liberating.”

Beyond the newsletter

Although the newsletter remains the primary delivery mechanism for The Nerve’s journalism, they have also expanded quickly into events. Becoming a member gives access to early and discounted booking for these events, as well as town squares with Nerve journalists, exclusive screenings and link-ups with other events where members get benefits and discounts.

Despite its launch at a political conference, the majority of partnerships have been with cultural events such as book and music festivals. At the end of September, The Nerve is involved with Vision Festival in Kings Cross, bringing together cultural and scientific institutions in the area like the British LIbrary and the Francis Crick Institute. “We’re doing a Nerve Live journalism morning at that, which members get discounted tickets to,” Donaldson noted.

However they have also been careful not to just have events in London. Donaldson said that they had held or partnered with events across the country, from Liverpool, Manchester and Bristol to Brighton and Wales.

Perhaps unsurprisingly given the team’s print roots, a magazine is in the works. The Nerve are launching their first ‘zine’ for founder members at their upcoming anniversary party. The Nerve Magazine will be a mix of already-published and exclusive pieces, with more long-reads and culture than news. Under current plans, it will continue to be published twice a year after September. 

“Print is very much not dead,” Donaldson laughed, describing their reasons for launching a physical product. “We’ve met quite a lot of people who’ve had great success with small-run, high-end magazines…there is an appetite for something that you can have with you for a while.”

Other plans for year two include expansion into podcasts, and more investigative coverage. But Donaldson is also cautious about moving too quickly. “It’s really important to build your team very carefully… All the big brands are cutting their output because it’s just not necessary to produce so much journalism, it’s what’s the important journalism,” she emphasised.

For now, the team has managed to produce consistently high-quality journalism on a relatively small budget, building a near-sustainable business from scratch. Donaldson is keen to keep the discipline the team started with around spending. 

“The best thing about starting with no money is you don’t spend all the money,” she acknowledged. “You really have to make all your decisions very carefully around what you’re going to invest in.”

Listen to the full episode in this week’s episode of The Publisher Podcast, available wherever you find podcasts.

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Welcome to the Publisher Newsletter by Media Voices: profiling the people and products powering publishing.

How to convince your boss to invest in print

It’s pretty easy to convince magazine fans that print is worthwhile, but it can be more difficult to bring around hard-nosed publishing managers. Here are 10 arguments you can make to help you stop managing decline and get your boss on board with a long-term print strategy, in this extract from our report Inside the Print Revival.

1: Print doesn’t have to cost a fortune

Fewer printed magazines is not something any print fan would support – unless it means more, better, premium-quality magazines. Cutting print schedules from weekly to monthly, monthly to quarterly, even bi-annual or annual is one way to keep publishing a quality product without breaking the bank.

Reducing paper weight is also an option if cost is a concern, but be mindful that discerning readers will notice. The last thing you want is for your paying audience to think that you have entered a publishing doom-loop where the inevitable outcome is your exit from the field.

2: Print can be profitable

Print publishing alone probably won’t make you rich, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t turn a profit with your magazine. Manage costs through clever workflows that integrate your print and digital content to support effective repurposing, and right-size your team to suit amended publishing schedules.

More important than costs, think about pricing. Print readers have a propensity to pay in a way that digital readers don’t. You can’t simply push your prices up, but if you communicate the real costs associated with producing a premium-print product, and can demonstrate the quality you are delivering, your most loyal supporters will pay higher prices.

3: Print brings incremental revenue

Each iteration of your content is an opportunity to bring in additional revenue from a different audience. The people that read TIME magazine online may be very different from the people who read the weekly in print – but that doesn’t mean you should see your print publishing operation as separate from your digital output. Your print and digital content need to be complementary.

Alex White at Immediate Media told me the holy grail for modern publishers is maximising the ROI on content creation. The most successful publishers do a great job of ‘sweating their assets’, making use of their content on as many platforms as makes sense

4: Print supports premium positioning

It isn’t easy to make a website feel special. Podcasts and newsletters can exude personality, but it’s hard to tell them apart inside a podcast or email app. On the other hand, picking up a well-made magazine instantly communicates its value. Readers can feel the weight, get a sense of the number of pages they are buying, and see the design.

Get the content, design and production values right and a print magazine becomes an affordable luxury for your readers. There’s no guessing what’s behind the paywall, it’s all right there in the pages for the reader to take home and place on their shelf.

5: Print increases visibility

Print doesn’t bring scale, but increasingly, neither do websites or social media. The digital noise is deafening, and getting your message heard online is only going to get harder. While print won’t go viral, it will sit on the coffee tables of your readers for weeks at a time, a constant reminder of what you do.

Even on overworked digital channels, social proof – from magazine shelfies to discussions in online communities – is a secret weapon for magazine publishers trying to cut through. And although traditional newsstand space is shrinking, specialty retail shops are bringing awareness to highly engaged audiences.

6: Print builds direct relationships

To ship a printed magazine to a reader, you literally need to know where they live. Your relationship isn’t disintermediated by an algorithm or a search engine; you’re in touch, direct to their mailbox, inside their home. And when you sell directly, you have their credit card or bank details. That relationship is yours to build on.

Content sinks without a trace in the constant stream of social media posts and shared links. But once you’ve put your magazine in your readers’ hands, they will always be able to find you and the content you create, able to recommend your work to their friends just by picking it up and handing it to them.

7: Print superserves superfans

The collapse of the NFT craze illustrates just how hard it is to really own anything virtually, in stark contrast to print’s tangibility out in the real-world. Collectors throughout history have expressed their philosophies and their passions through the written materials that they collect, from ancient manuscripts to comic books.

Your true fans, your superfans, want to complete their collections. Creating subscriber-only covers, cover series or merchandise is catnip to the completists. Make exclusives that deliver collectible value and you can deepen reader loyalty at the same time as boosting your bottom line.

8: Print offers an alternative

Research published in May 2025 by the British Standards Institution showed that 47% of young people aged 16 to 21 would prefer to be young in a world without the internet. That is only the most recent report spotlighting a society-wide backlash against our always-on digital culture.

Print magazines give exhausted audiences an easily accessible, distraction-free alternative to the firehose of digital media. The carefully curated serendipity of a good magazine lets people swap the endless scroll of social media for a bounded parcel of pages – informative and inspirational – that they can trust not to descend into a toxic hellscape.

9: Print enhances your portfolio

Despite our misgivings, no one thinks digital media is going to disappear. Modern publishing is a portfolio play, and done well, a strong digital-print mix can add real value to a brand. Where digital publishing can be faster, more convenient and sometimes cheaper, print plays to different strengths.

The slower pace of print allows for the development of context and nuance. Longreads work better on print real estate where there is more space for editorial design to support the storytelling. And a print magazine puts the reader in control of their media consumption, letting them put it down and pick it up where they left off whenever they want.

10: Print can be environmentally friendly

It’s easy to assume digital is greener – but the truth is more complicated. Energy hungry data centres, environmentally unfriendly device manufacturing and disposal, constant cloud￾syncing… they all contribute to an invisible carbon footprint that outweighs the one-time impact of producing a print magazine.

Done responsibly, print can be part of a circular economy: made from sustainably managed forests, produced using renewable energy, supported by carbon offsetting schemes, made to be easily recyclable or designed to be collected and kept. Print’s longer lifetime value cuts its carbon footprint and it never needs to be refreshed, recharged or renewed.

This chapter is taken from our report, Inside the Print Revival. Download it here, or buy your own copy in print.

Inside the Print Revival is made possible with the support of our sponsors: Freeport Press, Warners Media Group, Atex, FIPP, Piano, and Manson Group.

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This guest article by Charlotte Henry was first published on Flashes & Flames: The Global Media Business Weekly.

Is Puck the future of (more) newsletters?

In an age in which journalism’s traditional models have been stretched to breaking point, those in the industry are always looking for beacons of hope. Puck is surely one.

Founded in 2021, Puck is not just another general news site (at the intersection of Silicon Valley, Hollywood, Wall Street and Washington) trying to find its way. Or, indeed, a niche newsletter hoping to establish itself. Instead, it’s a network of newsletters (perhaps a bundle) in clear verticals fronted by superstar journalists. And these journalists are not just hired guns. From the outset, they were partners with a stake in the buzzy media company. A new approach, and one that incentivizes journalists.

As Wall Street writer (and former investment banker) William D. Cohan put it upon joining: “The equity in Puck is shared by the journalists who write for it, the editors who edit us, and the data experts who track how things are going. We are all in it together.”

Although venture capital firms own probably a majority of the Puck shares, the journalists – apart from being equity holders – receive financial bonuses tied directly to the subscription growth and retention they generate.

They are assigned very specific beats – Wall Street, tech, media, Hollywood and Washington, initially. Sports, AI and art have since been added. The broader focus is power and those who wield it.

In 2022, The New Yorker described Puck’s appeal to readers as being that “its writers move in the same elevated spaces as the people whom they cover….Puck makes no attempt to conceal its yearning for a rarefied audience. When subscribing—a hundred dollars for basic yearly access, two hundred and fifty to be a member of the “Inner Circle,” which includes off-the-record conference calls with the writers themselves—you’re asked to identify your job level. C-suite, senior director, senior executive, and director are four of the seven Puck-sanctioned reader careers.”

The magazine sniffily added: “The Puck style is authoritative and knowing. Its writers regularly refer to the moguls they cover by their first names. Their dispatches often have bits of news, but they’re also distilling the yammering going on in their specific coverage worlds. A common Puck trope is to speak of one’s phone and e-mail blowing up with sources clamoring to talk.”

The level of reporting and the cost of a subscription confirm the Puck target audience. But the subs price strategy has not deterred it from selling advertising. Ads do appear on the homepage, but Puck is careful not to interrupt the stories or newsletters with paid messages.

Given the calibre of journalists involved, it comes as no surprise that the stories are well reported, insightful and highly readable. Scoops published across the Puck suite include the revelations that Chris Licht was out as CNN CEO, that Tom Cruise and Paramount are working on Top Gun 3 and details of fast fashion brand She-in’s acquisition of Everlane. This work is frequently cited by other publications that Puck has beaten to the punch.

The scoops underline the Puck model – that journalists are akin to creators and people will follow them for their names and insight. But this talent also needs some institutional support, whether through publishing tech, marketing or ad sales.

By most measures, Puck seems to be working. In August 2023, just two years after launch, it had raised some $10mn in funding. In 2025, it generated revenue of $20mn, boasting 50,000 paying subscribers, according to Axios which noted that the company was not yet profitable but expected to be so in 2026.

Key to this success is the voice, knowledge and contacts of the individual writers. Whether that be Matt Belloni and Kim Masters’ encyclopaedic knowledge of Hollywood, John Ourand’s decade’s reporting on the business of sport, or Julia Alexander’s expertise in streaming. Subscribers want to know what these deeply-connected journalists, and the people they talk to, are saying. They are willing to pay to do so.

Puck has two tiers of subscription. A basic one and the Inner Circle. I’ve noticed an increasing amount of work being put behind that more expensive paywall. Those subscribers also get invites to calls with Puck journalists, reiterating the connection between reader and writer, as well as the “insider” nature of the product. The community approach is also similar to Jessica Lessin’s tech newsletter The Information.

It almost doesn’t need saying that Puck arrived into an already crowded market, and it has only gotten more so. Semafor, launched by Ben Smith and Justin Smith in 2022, is perhaps the clearest example of a competitor, given its focus on key verticals and its use of voicey, recognisable writers such as Max Tani (media) and Ben Smith himself.

Semafor's Ben Smith on evolving a news start-up for the post-traffic era

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But they are quite different businesses.

While both outlets essentially focus on power, Semafor is global, with distinct sections for Africa, Asia and the Gulf. Some of its newsletters are timed for non-US time zones. It also remains paywall free and dependant on top tier advertisers – and the large portfolio of live events that have helped to create a global profile and generate profit within just three years of launch

Given Puck’s structure, there is also an argument that independent, single person newsletters also directly compete with it for readers’ eyeballs and inbox space. I’m thinking Emily Sundberg’s Feed Me, a Substack-based newsletter about how people spend their money and time, particularly in New York, as an example.

The battle between these publications comes down to a few key factors.

Who has the best scoops or latest information, and who offers the writers that readers most want to spend time with?

Five years in, Puck has been keen to maintain its momentum. The founders have brought in new writers and acquired other newsletters. In April 2024, it acquired the Artelligence newsletter, bringing journalist Marion Maneker into the fold. This instantly launched it into a new vertical via a well-respected writer with a mailing list of 32,000 readers (free and paid).

Much more eye-catching was the deal to purchase AirMail, the high-profile newsletter company founded by ex-Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter. The deal was was said to be worth $16mn in cash and stock. Puck subscribers were given full access to AirMail, immediately making the whole package even more valuable and sticky. It also means that Puck now claims a paying subscriber base of around 100,000.

Like many other outlets, Puck has moved beyond the page and into podcasts. Several of its journalists – Byers, Alexander, Ourand, Belloni – have their own shows. Puck mostly works with Audacy to make these, although Belloni’s “The Town” is actually a partnership with rival company The Ringer. Puck’s flagship show is “The Powers that Be”, a 15/20-minute daily dive into a key story or tow, hosted by co-founder Peter Hamby. These are available to everyone, funded by advertising.

The company is now organizing some big events and gradually going all-in on live contact with readers. Its second “In the Arena” sports media conference is in New York in October: “a day chock-full of exclusive insights about the future of the sports media business”. Those insider calls are a central part of the Puck offering. It also puts on a couple of showy parties during the year. Again, they endorse it as a brand for those ‘in the know’.

With Puck forecasting a debut profit (or at least positive cashflow) this year, it’s worth noting that AirMail claimed to have stopped its loss-making by the time it was acquired. That contributes to the general sense that Puck has established its role and business model for the long term and may help to inspire others, even those whose star value doesn’t enable them to fundraise a total of $17mn as Puck has done.

The hints and tips for prospective newsletter launchers (who might just band together Puck-style rather than joining Substack individually) surely include the need to build a community of reader-users-contributors through digital, audio, and especially events. Revenue diversity, and encouraging flagship contributors to share the reward (and the risk) also seems an irresistible option.

Good reads:

Next steps with zero-click: From awareness to action

98% of respondents to a recent survey had heard of the zero-click phenomenon, and 54% were very familiar. However, Woodwing's John Fong points out that being aware of something and acting upon it are two different things.

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Lessons in turning newsletters into subscription engines

Dating back to Roman Times, the humble newsletter has not only endured but has grown in relevance and importance. Bypassing […]

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The Thinking Event

Why event content must meet people where their brains are now.

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Oh Lord, AI reporters are actually breaking big news

Last week, an AI newsroom beat mainstream journalists—including WIRED—to a story about OpenAI and hacking. It’s just the beginning.

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Spotify’s new ‘skip’ button could end the podcast business as we know it

Spotify is terrifying much of the podcast industry with a tiny little widget.

www.semafor.com/article/08/09/2026/spotifys-new-skip-button-could-end-the-podcast-business-as-we-know-it

How Hello! fought back after saying goodbye to Google Discover traffic

Hello! is making the most of platforms like Apple News and MSN while it builds paid memberships.

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FT teams up humans with AI to create stronger sense of community

People want to be seen as real people with authentic questions, ideas, and experiences instead of just being measured as a click or a pageview. With that in mind, the FT is moving from the idea of “audience” to one of “community.”

www.inma.org/blogs/newsroom-initiative/post.cfm/ft-teams-up-humans-with-ai-to-create-stronger-sense-of-community

Welcome to the Publisher Newsletter by Media Voices: profiling the people and products powering publishing.

Next steps with zero-click: From awareness to action

In MediaVoices’ recent Zero-click report, responses to Woodwing’s survey show that almost 98% of respondents had heard of the zero-click phenomenon, and 54% were very familiar. However, Managing Director John Fong points out that being aware of something and acting upon it are two different things. “You need to be aware of it, but you need to be on top of it,” he says, in this extract from the report.

A call to action

For John, the rise of zero-click is an evolution of the search landscape, and he uses a sporting analogy to illustrate. He explains that in Malaysia, where he’s based, pickleball is challenging tennis. “A lot of tennis courts have been converted to pickleball courts,” he explains. “That doesn’t mean that tennis is dead, just that people have more options.”

He says the data around the impact of zero-click searches may have been “a little blown out of proportion,” but that it is crucial for publishers to understand how the different segments of their audience are discovering and accessing their content.

“Traditional, organic search is still the highest results there, but there is a decline, especially when you look at the APAC region where internet consumption is dominated by mobile devices.”

He says when half of your phone screen is populated by agentic AI it is bound to reduce click throughs. “I don’t think it will ever go to zero, but now there is this part that we need to account for. If publishers have heard of this, seen this or experienced this, they should act on it.”

Start with your audience

Publishing’s ultimate response to the rise of zero-click search will have to include some clever technical fixes around AI optimisation and automation. However, the starting point for any effective publishing strategy has to be meeting audience needs.

John worries that some publishers, lost in an addiction to search-driven clicks, currently take their audiences for granted. He says: “They rely too much on search engines. As a publisher, a content producer, you need to own your audience. Whatever comes next, AI or AEO, you won’t have to worry because you actually know your audience. You know what they want and you can serve them directly.”

SEO Consultant Clara Soteras agrees, questioning the effort publishers expend on drive-by traffic. “We try to catch so many clicks… only for one shot. We have users that only visit us [once]. They find this news or this content on the feed, but they don’t know who the publisher is.”

For her, developing brand awareness is every bit as important as SEO. The direct traffic enjoyed by a strong brand bypasses search engines completely, but is also increasingly important in maximising AI citations and overall authority.

Clara says a brand presence on social media will have a continuing role to play; despite declining direct referrals, Google has announced greater inclusion of social media metrics in deciding content authority. Clara says: “Google is using these sources, these signals, to understand the authority of the brand or the creator.”

Brand awareness will be of vital importance if publishers are to be able to take advantage of Google’s rollout of the Preferred Sources feature, which will allow users to select trusted media brands to appear more often in the AI Overviews they are served.

Meet user needs

Clara also points to the user needs model developed by Dmitry Shishkin as a strong framework for building brand loyalty. “If we think of the user needs model, we understand that publishers and media can create a community, can offer the opportunity to be part of something, and share knowledge with people that have the same interests.”

SEO Consultant Barry Adams believes the current AI disruption should be seen as an opportunity for publishers to refocus on their audiences’ needs. He tells publishers now is the perfect time to, “re-evaluate what their purpose is, what their value as a publisher actually is, and more importantly, understand what their audience wants.”

He thinks too many publishers are confused over who their customers actually are. “They think advertisers are the customers,” he says, “which I think is the most critical strategic mistake a publisher can make. Advertisers help make you money, absolutely, but they’re not your customers. They’re enablers.”

Echoing Clara, Barry says the most successful publishers maintain a focus on what their audience needs from them. “Don’t worry about the intermediaries. Don’t worry about the channels. Make sure you deliver maximum value for the audience, and don’t be afraid to let people know what you’re doing.”

“The big news brands out there – the ones that are actually doing quite well, even the ones who went behind hard paywalls – they seem to be doing all right because they’ve never lost sight of what their purpose is for
their audience.”

Report: The Zero-Click Content Shift

What is zero-click search, and does it really pose an existential threat to the publishing business? Our new report aims to answer exactly that question.

MediaVoices • Peter Houston

Build a business beyond clicks

Barry Adams says he genuinely believes a lot of publishers don’t actually understand their business model and what they should be doing to grow their audiences. They have fallen into the trap of chasing traffic, writing content to ‘tick an algorithmic box’ rather than actually adding value.

Too many doubled down on commodity content – product reviews, lifestyle content and how-to guides – because it performed well in Google. “That’s now come tumbling down,” he explains.

Barry believes these are the publishers that are ‘terrified’ of zero-click. “They don’t realise why they got Google traffic in the first place. They don’t know why what they have been doing worked or didn’t work,” he says.

The danger is that they compound their mistakes by stopping investment in search optimisation. “Those same publishers then go and put more money into Facebook or Instagram or ChatGPT optimisations, which send fractions of a percent of the traffic to their website that Google does.”

Clara Soteras recognises the issue and says it is difficult to change the mindset of publishers who have worked for years with volume metrics as their lead KPIs.

She thinks this is driven largely by established advertising metrics – page views and unique users – and that it will be difficult for publishers to change this on their own. “We need to work together to understand the system because obviously advertisements are sold on these metrics. We need to change it.”

Clara says some of the larger companies that she works with are starting to understand that things are changing and they are starting to develop different kinds of partnerships and sponsorship deals. But, she says: “It is difficult for local publishers and the smallest publishers. This is something that we need to work on and we need to help them.”

This is an extract from our report The Zero Click Content Shift.

This report was researched and written in association with WoodWing.

WoodWing empowers publishing ecosystems by uniting technology with deep industry expertise. For 25+ years, we’ve helped teams create, manage, and deliver content across print and digital channels with greater efficiency and consistency. Our portfolio spans multi-channel production, digital assets, quality, knowledge, and information management. Founded in 2000, we operate globally from our headquarters in the Netherlands.  

Learn more about WoodWing’s publishing solutions at woodwing.com

AI can produce more. Just don't ask it for the meaning of life.

Publishers are getting better at using AI to accelerate production and solve operational problems. But no model can define your audience, sharpen your proposition or make the editorial decisions that distinguish your brand.

In The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Arthur Dent and Ford Prefect find themselves aboard a spaceship full of hairdressers, management consultants and telephone sanitisers speeding towards prehistoric Earth. After crash-landing, the crew spend their time holding meetings, inventing fiscal policy and producing an abundance of haircuts rather than solving the colony’s basic problems.

Eventually, these distinctly limited aliens become the human race.

This might be a drastic analogy, but I think it perfectly illustrates where we are today with AI in our newsrooms. AI can enable extraordinary levels of output. But it can also lock us into a cycle of plausible banality, like a shipload of Golgafrinchans mistaking activity for progress.

Without doubt, the first stage of AI novelty is over. Newsroom leaders and publishers no longer want to know what the technology can achieve. They want to know what it can achieve specifically for their audience, under specific conditions.

Product teams are no longer bombarding editorial teams with 20 experimental tools bolted onto their publishing systems. Instead, they are listening to editors, identifying pain points and discussing which tool might provide the right solution.

Could it be that AI is finally working for us, rather than the other way round?

Well, not quite.

There is still a lot of confusion about how an LLM generates an answer and why it remains a limited tool. Anyone who has forwarded a mostly AI-assisted report full of exciting recommendations, only to discover that the entire analysis collapses because of one small fabricated detail, will understand the problem.

The harsh reality is that while AI might accelerate your publishing work, it still cannot replace editorial judgement or generate a distinctive publishing strategy based on the specific needs of your audience.

So where does the confusion arise?

Declining audiences across search and social media have not helped. Some publishers are cutting costs while using AI to maintain roughly the same level of output. But falling referral traffic has also exposed a weakness that was already present at some brands: a broad content strategy lacking specificity, a vague understanding of the audience and an unclear proposition.

AI can help publishers interrogate these areas, organise audience evidence and expose gaps in their thinking. But it is strongest when working from patterns that already exist. True publishing innovation often begins by going beyond the most plausible answer and making a calculated bet that could fail.

What does that mean in practice?

It might mean backing an audience that initially looks too small, launching a format competitors are not using, pursuing a story with no guarantee of traffic or changing a successful product before the data clearly demands it.

A model can analyse those decisions, list the risks and identify comparable examples. What it can’t do is possess the conviction to make the bet or accept responsibility if it fails.

On 21 July, Substack introduced an AI-detection feature powered by Pangram. Readers can now request an estimate of how much of a post appears to have been written by a human or with AI assistance.

The danger is that readers and writers may begin treating a high human-written score as a proxy for originality and value. But the tool can only estimate how the words were produced. It cannot determine whether the person behind them had an original thought.

The meaningful divide is no longer between purely human and AI-assisted text. It is between work containing original judgement and work that merely imitates it.

To use AI or not to use AI is no longer the question. We now operate in a hybrid world, using AI throughout the publishing process while relying on human judgement to decide what is worth pursuing, publishing and defending.

AI can identify patterns, summarise audience research and generate a hundred possible directions. What it can’t do is decide which audience problem is worth solving, which principle should override a commercial opportunity or which original idea deserves an organisation’s time and reputation.

Those are not production tasks. They are acts of judgement.

The most successful publishers will not ask, “How much work can AI do for us?” They will ask, “Which parts of our business must remain distinctively human, and how can AI give our people more time to do them?”

And if we cannot achieve that, we might as well hitch a lift.

This is a guest post by consultant Steven Wilson-Beales. If your organisation is already using AI but needs clearer priorities, stronger audience insight or a more effective acquisition and retention strategy, Steven can help.

He works with publishers and content-led organisations to improve search and AI visibility, optimise newsletters, strengthen subscriber journeys and identify where investment will have the greatest impact.

Get in touch at me@stevenwilsonbeales.com

Good reads:

Terrapinn’s Sharon Roessen on boosting event registration and attendance with agentic AI

For publishers and event organisers, knowing where to start with AI is a common conundrum. For Bridged’s clients, the starting point is always a problem to be solved.

MediaVoices • Peter Houston

How one publisher turned newsletters into a digital growth engine

By reorganizing editorial, audience development and advertising around email, publisher Rough Draft Atlanta transformed a familiar product into the foundation of a digital business that now generates almost a third of company's revenue.

digitalcontentnext.org/blog/2026/07/30/how-one-publisher-turned-newsletters-into-a-digital-growth-engine

Is Puck the future of (more) newsletters?

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Time has started serving ads to AI agents

Time is selling ads targeting AI agents, betting that markdown pages will make its content (and advertisers) more visible in AI search.

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The inbox deserves more investment from publishers in the AI era

Northeastern University research shows news companies should invest more in e-mail.

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How three newsrooms are charting different paths for AI use

In our recent research, we examined how three different media outlets — Reuters, the BBC, and The Guardian — were deploying AI in their workflows.

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This guest article by Stuart Forrest was first published on Flashes & Flames: The Global Media Business Weekly.

Has the UK gone soft on Google?

The UK’s Competition & Markets Authority (CMA) has unveiled what it terms “world first” measures, purportedly granting publishers new-found agency over the utilisation of their content within Google’s AI Overviews and AI search functionalities.

The UK-only legislation is framed by the CMA as “a fairer way” for publishers to negotiate deals with Google. Simultaneously, Google launched an analytics trial for UK publishers to assess AI search visibility via Google Search Console. Google, promised future global access to these granular insights and controls, though without a firm timeline.

While action here is certainly preferable to stagnation, there is a lingering concern that these measures provide Google with a soft landing, potentially establishing a dangerously lenient regulatory bar just as other global jurisdictions weigh the requirements for a more meaningful future value exchange between publishers and the platforms.

After CMA’s decision to designate Google “strategic market status” (SMS) in the UK, allowing them to introduce targeted rules over how they operate, the recent announcement unveiled the first controls under this new regulatory status. The key announced elements were:

• Tools to allow publishers to exclude their content from AI features in search results pages at domain or URL level. Until now, publishers haven’t been able to opt out of AI features without losing all search traffic.

• A requirement by Google to properly attribute content in AI-generated results, with clear links.

• The ability to opt-out of content use in “fine tuning” of models, where foundation models are built upon with additional training data.

Separate from the regulatory controls but complementary to them, Google subsequently announced a limited trial for UK site owners of new AI search feature performance data within Google’s Search console analytics tool, for the first time giving insights into how AI features compare to regular search links.

All these changes are for UK search results only, and Google has six months to implement the controls. Some publishers are already seeing the data insights in their Search Console accounts and CMA’s Will Hayter has suggested that AI feature control tools may also arrive sooner than the December 2026 deadline.

But is it a victory for publishers, or a soft landing for Google?

The news was greeted with cautious optimism by large publishers and their trade associations. But is this actually the good news CMA believes, or is it a regulatory compromise that provides a Round One victory for Google by setting the regulatory bar too low?

The intricate details reveal major compromises that may prevent real change. This situation risks benefiting Google, which wants to prove AI features help both owners and users. If these hard-won controls see low adoption, it bolsters Google’s case for minimal regulation.

There are two critical reasons why these controls may fail to see any kind of meaningful uptake:

1. Publishers must opt-out of AI features, not opt-in

While UK publishers lobbied for an opt-in model, the CMA has instead mandated an opt-out framework for these AI functionalities. Consequently, the responsibility shifts away from Google to prove the worth of its AI features and onto publishers and trade groups, which must now evaluate the benefits of staying included and ensure that these new options are widely understood within the industry.

Given the intense competition and declining traffic volumes facing many in the sector, there is concern that a combination of market pressure and operational inertia may prevent many publishers from actually utilizing these newly available controls.

The danger is that low adoption of the controls, despite heavy lobbying, will allow Google to argue to regulators that its search features – which many blame for falling referral traffic – benefit both users and publishers.

2. Newly provided AI search data insights are simply insufficient

Publishers wanting to assess AI’s impact on referral traffic will find Google’s new data insufficient for informed decisions. While a slight improvement, the data lacks click metrics, query intent details, and pre-May 2026 historical records.

Without click data or comparative history, publishers simply cannot judge the value of inclusion or link AI rollouts to traffic declines, leaving Google’s transparency efforts largely illusory.

It’s notable that Bing – while a minnow in search terms – has actually provided substantially more insight to publishers for some months; historical data and aggregated search query data at URL level.

What does this mean for US publishers?

Google has stated that, while the proposed controls and greater data transparency will be tested in the UK first, they will eventually roll-out globally, albeit with no specific timeline commitment.

This is a good thing for US-based publishers, where there’s no meaningful legislative agenda favouring greater controls for publishers and no equivalent legislative instrument to the UK’s “SMS” designation for Google allowing such controls to be enforced.

In the US, the conversation is at individual publisher level, with the industry bifurcated between those large enough to pursue action against Google and AI platforms (eg New York Times and Condé Nast) or take up the small number of paid content deals on offer, leaving the vast majority of small publishers without either meaningful protection or licensing deals.

Will the UK actions have an impact?

Possibly, but certainly indirectly. If large numbers of UK publishers do withdraw their content from AIO then Google’s search experience may well suffer, and this could force a more equitable content licensing conversation with publishers globally, as those controls are made available to them and content is withdrawn in other jurisdictions.

Which brings us back to the critical question; has the CMA done enough to allow UK publishers to make a decision to exercise these controls?

The short answer really is no.

The opt-out measure, compounded by insufficient data granularity, greatly favours the status quo and it feels unlikely that a critical mass of publishers will withdraw their content. That’s a crucial requirement to bring platforms to the table to discuss meaningful licensing models.

Whatever happens, publishers and their associations will be watching closely – and should not concede anything to Google at what might prove to be a critical moment in this industry’s attempts to secure a meaningful future value exchange with platforms. Time to hold your nerve.

Good reads:

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With its third issue, audio magazine Signal Hill is transmitting further than ever

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Hearst starts with 'why' as journalists asked to produce fewer articles

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How tiny newsrooms are using AI — and their tips on effective use

AI can offer tangible benefits to startup founders: automating tasks, doing structured copy-editing, helping with research, creating fundraising and advertising systems and creating data-based products and tools.

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Mark Allen loves print magazines. Can he make them ‘High Tech, Sassy Sassy’?

After growth took a knock, Mark Allen Group is now targeting £100 million revenue. But it may require the print-loving founder to learn new tricks.

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Newsletter focus spells success for news digest brand The Knowledge

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Why 1.4 million people pay The Guardian for something they could read for free

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Partner content

This feature has been written in partnership with Bridged Media. Hear more in the Media Briefs episode with Sharon Roessen, Chief Operations officer at Terrapin, discussing how the global events organiser has worked with Bridged Media to develop a series of AI agents designed to streamline customer experience.

Terrapinn’s Sharon Roessen on boosting event registration and attendance with agentic AI

For publishers and event organisers, knowing where to start with AI is a common conundrum. For Bridged Media’s clients, the starting point is always a problem to be solved.

Welcome to the latest in our Media Briefs series of short, sharp sponsored episodes, this time featuring a senior executive working with a vendor that is making their businesses better.

In this episode, we hear from Sharon Roessen, Chief Operating Officer at global B2B events business Terrapinn, working with Bridged Media to develop a series of AI agents designed to streamline customer experience. Roessen spoke about the development process – from identifying a problem to developing a solution – and how one agentic AI experiment has led to a suite of agents that are increasing event attendance and easing registration bottlenecks.

Terrapinn is a UK-headquartered events business with a global footprint. The company organises conferences and exhibitions around the world, from Europe to Asia, The Americas to The Middle East, Africa to Australasia. The 30-year old business operates in a range of industry sectors including aviation, education, transport, technology, finance and health.

“We have about 90 events globally,” said Roessen. “Our sweet spot is probably around the 3,500 to 5,000 attendee mark for the confex style events that we do. Then we’ve got the large scale exhibitions. They get up to 35,000 registrations.”

Terrapinn has almost 400 staff around the world with each office supporting its own marketing, sales and event production using a centralised technology stack. Roessen explained: “Everything that we do, we tend to pilot once or twice and then roll out. If you went to work for us in Sydney, you’d walk in and get pretty much the same tech stack as if you were working for us in London or in Dubai. We can share a lot of the insights and data across the business.”

Starting simple

Terrapinn began working with Bridged Media about a year ago. Roessen said the starting point was a relatively simple agent on its website answering visitors’ questions. “We piloted that on a few events and now, for this year, it’s on nearly 60.”

With the success of the original project, Roessen and her team looked at what else they could do with AI agents. They were interested in exploring WhatsApp as a marketing channel, particularly in relation to Asia and the Middle East, and decided to trial an agent that could send a WhatsApp message to past attendees to register them for an upcoming event.

Through WhatsApp, the agent confirms the attendee’s details and passes them to Terrapinn’s Salesforce registration system. Roessen explained that the solution means attendees don’t need to download a specific registration app. “Assuming we’ve got your right mobile number, it will take your registration on WhatsApp. It will register you in Salesforce, push that all out and the customer gets their ticket.”

The agent also has a ‘concierge mode’ that can answer any questions that users might have about the event. “You can go on to WhatsApp and we’ve got that one-to-one communication channel,” said Roessen. “I think now we’ve answered something close to 50,000 unique questions. So we now have that knowledge source and we can feed that back into the teams.” 

Sending QR codes through WhatsApp has also reduced lines at registration. “That was actually the original problem that we were trying to solve: how can I get the QR code onto a device that you are going to guarantee to have with you and be able to find it really easy?”

Beyond shorter lines, improving registrations and answering questions, Roessen said she is really interested to see the potential for increasing event attendance through direct communication.

With attendee badges sent through WhatsApp, it is relatively simple to send regular reminders. “We might do that two or three times,” said Roessen, “to say ‘Remember the show’s on tomorrow. Scan this, get your badge really quick.”

Terrapinn has seen early success in Africa and Asia. “On one of our shows in Africa, we had around 4,500 people register through that WhatsApp channel, which I think accounted for close to 20% of all registrations. Our solar event in Malaysia had a 16% uplift from registration to attendance.”

Roessen acknowledges that success in other parts of the world may be slower to achieve. “In Africa and Asia they are used to doing business on WhatsApp. In Europe, we’re probably not as open to engaging on WhatsApp, but I think it will start to come.We had a show in London at the end of April and that saw a 4.5% lift in attendance, which is quite significant on a 15,000 reg show.”

Self-serve solutions

Bridged has built out Terrapinn’s agentic platform, the concierge service and the LLM behind it, plus web, email and WhatsApp integrations. Roessen added: “They’ve now built a portal, so that we can get some of our marketing people to self-serve it and it can come out of our central tech team.” 

Terrapinn started its AI journey looking at revenue and attendance, rather than chasing headcount headcount reductions or internal gains. “We are looking at a lot of that as well, but really, where we’ve put the investment and the time originally is how can we move the needle either by revenue or by attendance.”

Working with Bridged, Terrapinn is looking at the potential to monetise the system. “We’re looking at something called topic takeovers,” said Roessen. “If we’ve got 50,000 questions being asked, and someone says, “What solar panels have you got on display at the solar event in London?’ people could buy those as keywords. We’re going to be piloting that on three shows in September.”

Roessens’s advice for businesses looking for an AI partner would be to avoid getting tied into long-term contracts because the technology is changing so quickly.

“We’ve actually been pulling out of long contracts, where [vendors] are trying to tie you in for two or three years. That’s why for us Bridged has been so great – we buy everything on tokens, so if the customer doesn’t use it, we don’t use the tokens. We’re charged on success. If you can prove that AI is having an impact, then I think you can build the business case without spending a fortune.”

This Media Briefs episode is sponsored by Bridged Media, democratising AI for publishers. Through no-code AI solutions, Bridged lets publishers access the power of machine learning and Gen AI to meet their engagement and revenue objectives.

Learn more about Bridged Media’s no-code AI tools on their website.

Welcome to the Publisher Newsletter by Media Voices: profiling the people and products powering publishing.

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How Daily Mail Ireland turned Reader Opinions into First-Party Data

Most publishers treat reader engagement and commercial data as two separate problems. Daily Mail Ireland's digital team found a way to make one feed the other.

In an interview with Doug Farrell, Group Head of Digital Strategy, learn how:

• The team turned everyday poll answers into first-party audience data, which connects to their wider audience strategy

• Showing intent, not just reach, delivered a +40% lift in CPMs

• The model works as a repeatable approach for publishers of any size

Bookazines, pop-up newsletters and video pods: highlights from our latest podcasts

For 2026’s second season of the Publisher Podcast, we spoke to more than a dozen leading media practitioners about their work: where they’ve found success, what they’ve found hard and which challenges they are looking forward to tackling next.

From transformation to talent, post-traffic publishing to print, creators to community, here is a roundup of the insights we’ve taken away from the second half of this season’s guests. Thoughts from the first six episodes of the season are here.

Bauer’s Lauren Holleyoake on the business of bookazines

Bauer Media UK, part of the family-owned Bauer Media Group, is the country’s biggest selling magazine publisher. Its portfolio includes TV Choice, Take A Break and Heat in the weekly market, the biweekly women’s glossy Grazia and iconic entertainment monthlies Empire and Mojo.

Publisher Lauren Holleyoake leads the company’s growing bookazine business and told us the publishing brands she looks after operate ‘way beyond their print heritage’ but that print is still a big revenue driver. She described Bauer’s collectible-print offerings as ‘beautiful, big, premium’ products.

Part of making the numbers work on bookazines is being bold on pricing. Holleyoake told us  lower-priced weeklies like TV Choice are big earners for Bauer in the UK, however the bookazine market can support premium price points: “We’re being much, much more bullish with price than perhaps we were in the past.”

• The bookazine market can support premium prices

• Superserve fandoms with beautifully produced deepdives

• Centralised processes improve P&L

Three key themes driving B2B publishers

Monetising B2B Information and Events – June 2, 2026

Flashes & Flames’ Monetising B2B Information and Events conference took place in London on the 25th of May, 2026. At the event, more than 30 industry-leading speakers highlighted the transformation going on in the B2B sector as publishers and event organisers move away from passive information delivery to become an integral part of their customers’ workflows.

Julie Harris, CEO at commodity intelligence provider Expana, argued that AI will amplify businesses with strong, defensible ‘moats’, highlighting proprietary data, transparent and trusted methodologies, and strong customer relationships. Questex CEO, Paul Miller, said his staff no longer work for an events company or a media company, they work for a ‘connecting’ company.

A third theme which emerged across a number of panels and interviews was that the most valuable B2B businesses are those that can become indispensable infrastructure for the professional communities they serve. Amin Mrini, Chief Digital Officer at Informa Festivals, said being inside workflows where the work is taking place is critical.

• Build ‘moats’ to protect against AI disruption

• Create intelligence ecosystems

• Become indispensable infrastructure to customers

What The Conversation UK has learned from a decade in podcasting

The Conversation is a charitable organisation funded by universities, foundations and research bodies. It has 10 editions, operates in14 countries, and publishes content under a Creative Commons license. The mission is to be a bridge between academics and the general public, with journalists helping communicate complex ideas to non-specialists.

Gemma Ware, Head of Audio at The Conversation told us it is important for its podcast topics to have a long shelf life. She explained how the Expert guide to conspiracy theories series, made just before 2020’s COVID lockdowns, still stands up today. Other series, like Jane Austen’s Paper Trail, released to mark 250 years since her birth, are built around key events or anniversaries.

Ware also told us how The Conversation UK had experimented with video podcasting, launching Strange Health early in 2026. Her team saw this as an opportunity to meet younger audiences where they are seeking health content – YouTube – but acknowledged that resource constraints have limited video output. 

• Podcasts can have an extended shelf life

• Series support deep dives and attract more funding

• Audio is a great way to highlight community voices

How The Guardian turns pop-up newsletter readers into regular subscribers

The Guardian shifted its newsletter strategy away from organic, ad-hoc launches seen by desk editors as a way to drive referral traffic a few years ago. Its current approach sees the newsletter format as uniquely authored products, designed to connect with specific reader groups rather than simply replicate existing web content.

Toby Moses, the Guardian’s first Head of Newsletters, told us about the thinking behind launching a pop-up World Cup newsletter targeted at US ‘soccer’ fans. He explained that pop-up newsletters centered on real-world events have a track record of incredibly high-engagement, but that the long-term goal is to transition short-run readers to a more permanent newsletter property.

Moses said data helps inform newsletter strategy, but that editorial instincts and audience feedback are equally important. He highlighted The Guardian’s gaming newsletter, Pushing Buttons, which has a relatively small audience but delivers huge engagement from an audience that skews more female and younger than other Guardian newsletters.

• Pop-up newsletters deliver high-engagement

• Publishers need to transition short-run readers to permanent newsletters

• Editorial instincts and audience feedback play an important part in newsletter strategy

From magazine to outdoor media ecosystem: the evolution of Outside Inc

Outside Media Inc. brings together 15 media brands in the outdoor world – from backcountry travel to mountain biking – plus a host of tracking, fitness and mapping apps, real-world events, travel services and a film and TV channel. In total, the business runs 25 brands across outdoor sports and healthy living.

Outside magazine once set the gold-standard for long-form journalism about life outdoors. Chief Media Officer, Heather Dietrick told us that, these days, it sits at the centre of a media ecosystem designed to inspire and guide people through their journey outdoors.

She explained that beginners can subscribe to content-only bundles, while those that are more advanced can upgrade to mapping and tracking apps. Dietrick told us Outside Inc. provides its users with content designed to spark ideas and support training, while utility apps help users achieve their goals, and associated communities provide a place to celebrate their achievements.

• Provide a choice of routes to subscription

• Outside’s content and utility offerings are closely related

• Consumer revenue provides more control than advertising

Audience-first focus drives multi-platform success at Immediate’s food brands

Immediate Media has three brands in its Food Group: the 30-year old Good Food magazine; olive magazine, launched in 2003; and Good Health by Good Food, a new social-first sub-brand built specifically to counter the growing volume of health and nutrition disinformation online. The company also owns the Nutracheck dieting app and website.

Lily Barclay is the first Content Director appointed to oversee Immediate’s Food Group, with her role covering the full portfolio in print, digital, video and social media. She told us that the group’s content planning sits on an audience-first strategy that is intimately tied to multi-platform distribution.

Barclay’s team concentrates on content that will add value to the group’s specific audiences – utility for Good Food, inspiration for olive and education for Good Health. However, although there is one point of conception, she noted that quality content can be edited and repurposed to make it relevant across a variety of platforms.

• Quality content works in multiple places

• Success rests on identifying a clear audience need

• Premium print sells at a premium price

Good reads:

Brand ecosystems, the post-traffic era and scaling local journalism: highlights from our recent podcasts

From transformation to talent, post-traffic publishing to print, creators to community, here is a roundup of the insights we’ve taken away from the first six of this season's guests.

MediaVoices • Peter Houston

This baseball newsletter is proving that smaller audiences are good business

By serving baseball’s biggest obsessives instead of chasing mass appeal, Lance’s Pitcher Notes is showing how niche media can thrive

Poynter • Mark Simon

Claude's ability to remix 'liquid content' is 'serious challenge for news media'

Speaking at the MediaVoices Publisher Summit, Digital News Report author Nic Newman explained how publishers should respond.

Press Gazette • Charlotte Tobitt

Introducing the winners of 2026’s Publisher Podcast Awards and Publisher Newsletter Awards

MediaVoices are delighted to reveal the winners of 2026’s Publisher Podcast and Newsletter Awards, following a ceremony which took place on Wednesday 8th July at HUCKSTER, London.

MediaVoices • Esther Kezia Thorpe

How creators scored for publishers at the World Cup

In today’s media business, journalists are creators and creators are journalists. This has been particularly evident during the World Cup. Publishers have

Digital Content Next • Charlotte Henry – Independent Media Reporter

Want to build audience and revenue through live events? These five news nonprofits have some ideas to get you started

A community run? A block party? A trivia night? There are options for newsrooms of all stripes and sizes.

Nieman Lab

Newsweek's traffic fell 75%. Its revenue is rising anyway.

The publisher is on pace to surpass $100 million in revenue, powered by ad-tech, a rankings business, and events

www.adweek.com/media/newsweek-traffic-decline-revenue-rise-2026

Catching up with The Publisher Summit & Awards

We had a fantastic time last Wednesday welcoming hundreds of you to The Publisher Summit during the daytime, and the Newsletter and Podcast Awards in the evening.

We’ve been taking a well-deserved break since then, so are just getting ourselves together. It’s been wonderful reading your feedback and highlights, both in our inboxes and on Linkedin, so thank you.

As we’re planning to release the on-stage sessions as part of our next season of the newsletter and podcast (coming soon!) we haven’t done a round-up ourselves. However, some of our wonderful attendees have, so here’s a link to some of the key themes and learnings from the day:

Introducing the winners of 2026’s Publisher Podcast Awards and Publisher Newsletter Awards

MediaVoices are delighted to reveal the winners of 2026’s Publisher Podcast and Newsletter Awards, following a ceremony which took place on Wednesday 8th July at HUCKSTER, London.

MediaVoices • Esther Kezia Thorpe

“Stop renting your audience from other platforms”: What publishers can learn from Good Housekeeping, The Guardian and The Times

At Media Voices’ first publishing summit, publishers were urged to build deeper reader relationships, focus on fewer things, and make trust count.

Steven Wilson-Beales

Publish less, own more: a day inside The Publisher Summit

Guardian, Times, Telegraph and Hearst on why publishing less builds deeper reader relationships, and why Reuters Institute data says it may not hold.

The Media Stack

What We Learned at The Publisher Summits and Awards 2026: Why the Future Belongs to Media Brands That Own Their Audience

If there was one overwhelming takeaway from this year's Publisher Summits and Awards in London, it was optimism. 

Adestra

Thanks to the above for their lovely write-ups, and we’ll be back with our regularly-scheduled and slightly more comprehensive newsletter next week!

Esther and Peter

Good reads:

How Hello! Turned an Industry-Wide Google Traffic Drop Into an Off-Platform Audience Success

With Google referrals falling across the publishing industry, Hello! built a cross-platform data strategy designed to grow off-platform audience without handing editorial control to any single channel

Jez Walters

How apps can be engagement and retention powerhouses: in conversation with Pugpig's Jonny Kaldor

In this special Conversations episode of The Publisher Podcast, sponsored by Pugpig, we hear from CEO and founder Jonny Kaldor about the data that proves apps are engagement and retention powerhouses.

MediaVoices • Esther Kezia Thorpe

Print magazine boosts revenue for Youtube newsbrand TLDR

Youtube publisher TLDR News has increased its revenue by 28% after its print magazine and merchandise became its biggest source of income.

Press Gazette • Alice Brooker

Brand ecosystems, the post-traffic era and scaling local journalism: highlights from our recent podcasts

From transformation to talent, post-traffic publishing to print, creators to community, here is a roundup of the insights we’ve taken away from the first six of this season's guests.

MediaVoices • Peter Houston

How TIME, The Economist and Dow Jones each decided what to expose to AI agents

Three of the smartest names in media looked at the AI-agent future and moved in different directions, protecting their unique assets.

News Machines • Ulrike Langer

Sir John Hegarty’s verdict: advertising is now a product people pay to avoid

Sir John Hegarty told Cannes Lions 2026 the industry is making a product people pay to avoid, and that only entertainment, brand-building and creativity can fix it.

The Media Stack

Welcome to the Publisher Newsletter by Media Voices: profiling the people and products powering publishing.

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The first-party data question every publisher is trying to answer

With third-party signals disappearing, the pressure is on to turn audience engagement into data you actually own. DMG Ireland found a way to do exactly that, and the commercial results speak for themselves.

In an interview with DMG’s Group Head of Digital Strategy, learn how:

• DMG turned everyday reader interactions into scalable first-party audience segments

• The strategy behind a +60% CTR and +40% CPM uplift

• How richer audience data helped their team win more advertiser pitches

• A repeatable model any publisher can apply to their own site network

Brand ecosystems, the post-traffic era and scaling local journalism: highlights from our recent podcasts

For 2026’s second season of the Publisher Podcast, we spoke to more than a dozen leading media practitioners about their work: where they’ve found success, what they’ve found hard and which challenges they are looking forward to tackling next.

From transformation to talent, post-traffic publishing to print, creators to community, here is a roundup of the insights we’ve taken away from the first six of this season’s guests. Thoughts from our second six episodes will follow soon.

How Faversham House transformed from traditional B2B publisher to digital and events powerhouse

Faversham House is an independent B2B media company in the UK working across the utilities and sustainability sectors. Following a 2010 MBO, the business has moved from a traditional ad-funded, print-led publishing model to focus on online information, subscriptions and events.

CEO, Amanda Barnes told us that cultural change was essential at the beginning of the transformation process, with editorial and commercial teams having to become more flexible as rigid print schedules fell away. The next step in Faversham House’s journey was to bring events under specific brand ‘ecosystems’ to ensure that all staff working on a brand were invested in their content and their events. Lastly, Barnes said the business learned that one-size-fits-all membership models don’t work, helping the business fine-tune its reader revenue propositions and crucially the marketing for them.

• The first big change is always cultural

• Align content, commercial and event teams inside brand ecosystems

• Centre the audience when building membership offerings, events and products.

Semafor’s Ben Smith on evolving a news start-up for the post-traffic era

Semafor is a digital news platform founded in 2022. The business, profitable in 2025, was set up  to challenge legacy news brands for the attention of an estimated 200 million college educated, English-speaking readers globally.

Editor-in-Chief Ben Smith told us that although the web still matters, Semafor launched with newsletters because they provide a foundation for connecting with audiences elsewhere. Just three years after launching, with over 1 million sign ups to a dozen newsletters, the publisher has a premium events business that returns half of its $40 million annual revenue.

Semafor is currently ad-funded, but hasn’t ruled out subscriptions, with Smith saying successful media companies can’t afford to be ‘ideological’ about revenue. His advice to start-ups is to avoid doing too much too quickly and to think really hard about the quality, not the scale, of your audience.

• Newsletters give you a direct connection to your audience

• Quality audiences translate to quality events

• Great journalism gives you permission to do other things

Variety’s Dea Lawrence on turning a legacy publication into a cultural brand

Variety has transformed from an entertainment industry icon into a business + consumer hybrid. Now owned by Penske Media Corp., it was founded in 1905 as a weekly newspaper reporting on theater and vaudeville and has evolved into a global entertainment, media and cultural brand across print, digital and real-world events.

The business of entertainment still sits at the core of Variety’s mission to be the media company of record for the industry. However, alongside movies, television and music, the brand now covers streaming services, podcasts and audio books. And where Variety was once only an industry paper, it now targets both professional and consumer audiences. It still has a weekly print circulation of 70,000, mostly professionals, but also gets 20 million monthly uniques on variety.com, mostly consumers. 

Publisher Dea Lawrence told us that, with 25% of Variety’s audience outside the United States, international expansion is a huge priority. Events are also a big part of its long-term diversification efforts with the brand hosting almost 100 ‘small, intimate, very exclusive’ gatherings in 2025.

• Print is still strong with professional audiences

• Real-world ‘moments’ generate high-impact digital content

• Advertisers want to be part of exclusive experiences

How a creator-led news network is amplifying voices from the Global South

Global South World (GSW) is a news brand founded in 2023 to deliver a better informed and more nuanced understanding of the Global South. Its mission is to ‘counter parachute journalism and condescension’ with news and opinion from a network of journalists and creators that live across Asia, Africa and South America.

GSW Editor Ismail Akwei told us how western media too often minimises whole continents to one negative news story. To counter the dominance of news produced through a Western lens, GSW’s guiding principle is to amplify the voices of people in the Global South.

Working with staff around the world and a network of freelancers, it also partners with creators on the ground in the countries that it covers. The publisher has seen success from photo galleries, data visualisations and video, including live streams centred on the Iran-Israel- US war. It is also working to build an active online community using platforms from Instagram, TikTok and LinkedIn to WhatsApp.

• Sometimes it’s about stories, other times it’s about formats

• Create content the platforms audiences are on

• Work with creators builds social traffic

Bustle’s Charlotte Owen on ditching the ‘everything for everyone’ era

Bustle is a women’s media brand owned by BDG, now home to 11 popular culture, lifestyle and parenting brands – from Bustle to Nylon, Scary Mommy to Fatherly. While Bustle’s target audience is women in their 20s and 30s, it focuses on a narrow subset that wants to ‘have lots of adventures, have fun and get out there.”   

Since Charlotte Owen, EVP of Editorial at BDG as well as Editor-in-Chief for Bustle, joined Bustle in 2018, its parent company has acquired a suite of brands targeting a range of related, but specific audiences. She told us the big advantage of working with a stable of brands is that the editorial team can be very selective in story placement.

With more than 9 million Instagram followers, social media is a big part of Bustle’s publishing strategy. At the core of its content creation process is the question: does this story need to exist? That has helped Bustle and the rest of BDG’s brands focus on their value proposition and avoid the trap of publishing commodity content that is already online.

• You can’t be everything to everyone

• As a leader, you need to know when to get out of the way

• Relationships are key to editorial access and commercial success

Axios Local’s Liz Alesse on shaping the business to crack sustainable local journalism at scale

Axios Local is a five-year old Axios offshoot that publishes daily newsletters to help readers ‘get smarter, faster’ about their hometowns. It has still to turn a profit, but it delivers free-to-read newsletters to over 2 million subscribers in 37 US cities. Expansion plans spotlight the need for scalable systems and revenue sustainability.

Axios Local VP Liz Alesse told us that the business has learned a lot over its first five years about what makes a strong editorial product at the local level and is now building out the systems needed to support the expansion of local publishing teams. Advertising is Axios Local’s largest revenue stream, and the business is also exploring solutions that work for ad buyers at all levels, not just nationally.

Every Axios Local newsletter follows the ‘Smart Brevity’ style pioneered by Axios, using bullet points and short sentences to make them easy to scan. However, personality is also important, with reporters encouraged to emphasise their own voice, and find stories that appeal to readers in the local communities they cover.

• Scaling relies on finding the sweet spot between bespoke and cookie-cutter

• AI is useful to cut-out manual tasks, but never reporting

• You can’t rely on a single revenue stream

Good reads:

How apps can be engagement and retention powerhouses: in conversation with Pugpig's Jonny Kaldor

In this special Conversations episode of The Publisher Podcast, sponsored by Pugpig, we hear from CEO and founder Jonny Kaldor about the data that proves apps are engagement and retention powerhouses.

MediaVoices • Esther Kezia Thorpe

Philadelphia Inquirer turned cancellation moments into loyalty engines

By implementing a new initiative to redesign the subscriber journey, The Philadelphia Inquirer was able to reverse churn and saw long-term retention exceed 75% across print and digital.

International News Media Association (INMA)

CMA targets Apple and Google app stores: 'Good news for publishers'

The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has set out new rules for app stores to steer users away from Apple and Google payment platforms.

Press Gazette • Alice Brooker

Audience-first focus drives multi-platform success at Immediate’s food brands

When Lily Barclay joined Good Food Magazine as a digital assistant, print dominated the title’s output. Now, Barclay is content director for Immediate Media’s Food Group and print is just one part of her muti-platform, multi-brand portfolio.

MediaVoices • Peter Houston

The rise of the news creator

As trust in traditional media erodes, the 2026 Reuters Institute Digital News Report shows Nigerians and Kenyans turning to news creators in record numbers.

Oritsejolomi Otomewo

The Economist launches new audio and video tier targeting younger subscribers 

The new tier, launched today, is the latest step in The Economist’s strategy to use audio and video as a gateway for younger audiences.

Digiday • Sara Guaglione

Welcome to the Publisher Newsletter by Media Voices: profiling the people and products powering publishing.

Last call for The Publisher Summit 2026!

Join us in London on July 8th for a day dedicated to direct-to-audience strategies, including apps, podcasts and newsletters. Check out the agenda here (only a few Summit tickets remain).

Media Voices

Why apps are engagement and retention powerhouses: in conversation with Pugpig’s Jonny Kaldor

In this special Conversations episode of The Publisher Podcast, sponsored by Pugpig, we hear from CEO and founder Jonny Kaldor about the data that proves apps are engagement and retention powerhouses.

Pugpig has just released their annual 2026 Media App Report, packed with benchmarks and insights from 140 media brands and 440+ live apps. Jonny looks at some of the publisher app trends from the report, why direct consumer relationships are the highest priority right now, and the deeper levels of engagement shown by app users compared to web visitors.

He also explains why apps are now surprisingly being used for subscriber acquisition, not just retention, and how publishers can identify gaps in their conversion strategies using apps.

Here are some highlights from our conversation:

What’s changed with apps over the past year

I think apps serve the same purpose they have done for a long time. The difference is that like any technology, we’ve been through the excitement and the ‘Valley of despair‘, and now I think we’re genuinely getting back to a sense of maturity…that [apps] are an absolute requirement, table stakes now, whereas five years ago we were actually having to justify why people needed to do this.

All of this talk about Google Zero, and referrals falling off a cliff, it does feel like direct consumer relationships are the most important thing right now for publishers. There’s a general sense across our publisher portfolio… that this is the number one platform for them now in terms of engagement, with the super valuable parts of their audience.

Fliss, who is joining us next week [at The Publisher Summit]… they’ve actually switched from web-first to app-first. Particularly for consumer magazine brands, I think that’s really interesting. Obviously Mark Thompson did it with the New York Times a number of years ago, but you don’t hear it that often, so the fact that we’re hearing that more often now is really interesting.

Apps for subscriber acquisition

It’s absolutely clear that apps are terrible at acquiring new audiences, because how on earth would you happen upon an app in that way? Almost everyone who’s downloading an app has some prior knowledge of a brand.

But if you take a broad stroke across our portfolio, something like 92% of our publishers have a paywall. So they tend not to be free apps, and yet about 50% of the users in these apps are non-subscribers. So there is a huge audience using these things, getting some sort of value out of them, and not paying any money, not generating any reader revenue.

There’s clearly a big opportunity to take that group of people and work out how to drive them up that pyramid from anonymous to known to subscribing to advocate and member, and so on.

If you only see [apps] as a retention tool, you’re only going to invest in the retention journeys. You’re only going to look at retention data. And because the audiences are relatively small in apps, you tend to think that your biggest reward is going to come from web.

Now, as publishers try to eke out more and more value, the app just seems like an obvious place to go. People like The Independent for example, and Stylist do tend to think a little bit differently, and are starting to think about those user journeys. How can you surface enough content to get people hooked, but leave enough behind the paywall so that you know the people who really care about the content will hopefully subscribe?

How richer app features are evolving

Audio has become table stakes for our publishers, which I think is awesome. 30% of our publishers have an audio-centric user experience now as part of their app, and it really makes a difference to time spent.

There’s two types of audio consumption: there’s podcasts, which are brilliant for engagement and does feel like a more differentiated product, and then there’s the text-to-speech, read my article [ones].

Something that we’re seeing getting real engagement, with an increasing number of our publishers doing it, is ‘Read the top five stories to me’, and it literally just cues them up. I think that’s such a nice, simple, time-saving feature that people are starting to really engage with.

Funnily enough, video is the one that still feels weirdly nascent in the apps. 22% of our publishers are using video as a primary means to deliver content. Up until very recently, that’s been repurposing landscape video that really works on a desktop browser and doesn’t tend to be great in an app.

Social media has trained everybody on consuming [vertical video]. But also as a news organisation creating video for that channel like the Baltimore Banner, people were consuming their vertical video on TikTok and then saying, “Well, why can’t we get this same content in the app?” And so that was the thing that pushed them to actually start doing vertical video properly in the app.

The opportunity gap in publisher apps

Let’s say you’re a reader revenue business, the percentage of subscribers using the app on a monthly basis – you would be amazed at the breadth of performance across our portfolio. The Spectator, they have nigh on 90% of their subscriber base using the app every month.

So you take that data point, and you look at other subscriber businesses where they’re closer to 30%. You should be aspiring to 90% of your subscriber base using the app, and if they’re not, there’s got to be a good reason. Either the app’s not good enough, or the content isn’t good enough, or – most likely in our experience – you’re not telling people about it often enough.

The publishers we see really putting effort into their app…it’s very clear that those apps perform considerably better than the ones who launch an app and let it flow. There has to be an investment for these things to do well: an investment in the product, an investment in the content, and an investment in marketing to drive people to the product.

When people do all three, like Stylist, like The Spectator, like The Independent, you see remarkable results.

The 2026 Pugpig Media App Report

Get benchmark data from 440+ live news, consumer and business media apps, plus publisher survey insights on priorities, blockers and measurement gaps for 2026.

Pugpig | The mobile publishing platform for newspapers, magazines and more

Listen to the full episode in this week’s episode of The Publisher Podcast, available wherever you find podcasts.

This Conversations episode is sponsored by Pugpig. 

Pugpig is the leading mobile publishing platform powering 400 apps for over 150 publishers globally spanning news media, consumer magazines and B2B. Our platform allows media brands to launch deeply engaging mobile apps that significantly drive up reader revenue and retention.

Cultivating direct relationships with readers and focusing on reader revenue are the number one priority for publishers. This is where Pugpig apps come in: we provide the most beautiful and effective way to engage publishers' most valuable audience, to build habit and to retain them for as long as possible.

Learn more and download Pugpig's 2026 Media App Report at pugpig.com

Good reads:

How Hearst UK and Stylist use app extra features to enhance reader relationships

Apps can be a powerful retention tool for subscription publishers. If they want readers to come back regularly, having enhanced features and added extras like games can be key to building habits and making the app ‘sticky’. However, content must always be at its heart.

MediaVoices • Esther Kezia Thorpe

Why the FT’s app is its most powerful retention tool

“Subscribers that are only or primarily on the app are 37% less likely to cancel than non-app users,” said the Financial Times’ Muj Ali. Here's how the business publication has turned its app into a vital retention channel.

MediaVoices • Esther Kezia Thorpe

Why the new Observer retains Tortoise Media’s focus on audio-first publishing

Following Tortoise's purchase of The Observer, the publisher is rebranding its audio content and exploring new cultural verticals, while using its app to drive audience growth and retention. Here are some key takeaways from Aleena Augustine's talk at the Publisher Podcast Summit.

MediaVoices • Chris Sutcliffe

How publishers are using apps to deepen engagement and improve retention

Ahead of The Publisher App Summit on June 11th, we’re spotlighting how leading news publishers are using apps in smart ways to connect with readers and drive long-term value.

MediaVoices • Esther Kezia Thorpe

How The Baltimore Banner uses an app as a statement of intent

Most new local news outlets launch an app later in their lifecycle - if ever. But The Baltimore Banner launched one very quickly. Here's why.

MediaVoices • Chris Sutcliffe

Welcome to the Publisher Newsletter by Media Voices: profiling the people and products powering publishing.

Last call for The Publisher Summit 2026!

Join us in London on July 8th for a day dedicated to direct-to-audience strategies. Check out the agenda and the final few remaining tickets here (sales close Wednesday).

Media Voices

Audience-first focus drives multi-platform success at Immediate’s food brands

When Lily Barclay joined Good Food Magazine as a digital assistant, print dominated the title’s output. Now, Barclay is content director for Immediate Media’s Food Group and print is just one part of her muti-platform, multi-brand portfolio.

This week on The Publisher Podcast I spoke with Lily Barclay, Content Director for BBC Good Food and olive magazine at Immediate. Barclay is actually the first Content Director appointed to oversee Immediate’s Food Group, with her role covering the full portfolio in print, digital, video and social media.

Barclay’s career at Immediate began almost 20 years ago when she joined Good Food as a digital assistant. She sees her current role as a symptom of the multi-platform evolution that Immediate’s food titles have undergone over the last few years.

“I started out as a digital assistant on Good Food when I was 23 or 24 and it’s a very different beast [now]. It was very much print dominant when I joined the business; print is still a really important part of our portfolio, but we are planning in a much more multi-platform way.”

At the centre of the group’s content planning is an audience-first strategy that is intimately tied to multi-platform distribution.

“When you’re creating content that is audience-first, you know that it can work on multiple platforms,” Barclay explained. “You might have one point of conception… but then we edit it in various different ways to make it relevant for the platforms that we’re using.”

Multi-brand, multi-platform

There are three brands in Immediate’s Food Group: the 30-year old Good Food magazine; olive magazine, launched in 2003; and Good Health by Good Food, a new social-first sub-brand built specifically to counter the growing volume of health and nutrition disinformation online.

Good Food is all about utility, helping people solve everyday problems. “We really believe that Good Food is for everyone, no matter their time restrictions, their budget, or their dietary requirements. We work very hard to have content that appeals to a really broad section of society,” said Barclay.

Olive is more aspirational, celebrating food culture and encouraging people to slow down and enjoy food. “It’s restaurants, it’s travel, it’s cocktails and drinks. It’s about entertaining,” said Barclay. The audience there is much more likely to want to spend time creating something special, looking for a lifestyle rather than everyday recipes.

Where Good Food and olive are long-established newsstand magazine brands, Good Health by Good Food launched at the end of 2025 to counter the growing volume of health and nutrition disinformation online. Targeted at a Gen Z audience, it posts health videos five or six times a week on Instagram, TikTok and YouTube.

Across the three brands, Barclay’s team concentrates on content that is going to add value to each specific audience. She explained: “If it’s Good Food, we need to think what is the problem that our audience have and how do we make that better for them. What is the solution that we can offer that is genuinely helpful and accessible to our audience? Then we’ll start thinking about what platform that [should] be distributed on.”

Barclay highlighted the expert content commissioned for Good Health by Good Food to illustrate how one piece of content can be repurposed in multiple places.

“We will invest in long-form health content that has been written by doctors or nutritionists,” she explained. “That piece of content could start out as an Apple News article, but then will be reused in print – we have a Good Health by Good Food miniature magazine that’s in Good Food every month.”

She said that same article could also be used as the inspiration for a video script for TikTok or Instagram videos. “Because we really do invest in content that we know is good quality and factually correct, it can have many different lives in many different places.”

Meeting audience needs

Turning back to the audience-first aspect of content planning, Barclay explained that the investment in Good Health from Good Food was made to meet a clearly identified audience need. “Health was always one of our strongest pillars at Good Food,” she said. “We were getting about 10 million page views per month going to health; that was a combination of healthy recipes as well as long form articles and video content.”

The popularity of Good Food’s health content ran parallel to a growing trend for younger audiences to look to social media for health advice. “There were some stats in that space that said only 2% of health advice on TikTok is actually correct,” Barclay explained. “We wanted to be able to provide credible, fun, and interesting health information to a younger audience on the platforms that they were using.”

The investment has paid off, with Good Health by Good Food racking up 27 million views since launch with over 26,000 followers across social media. “We see really significant engagement on those posts. People are saving and sharing and they’re coming back to that content. The month on month stats are really encouraging. I think it is a really good example of there being a clear audience need, and following that with strong and credible information.”

Premium print paying off

Meeting audience needs isn’t just about new digital initiatives. Last year, olive magazine underwent a major print refresh, going from 13 times a year to eight, but with the increasingly familiar ‘premium print’ makeover. The magazine’s cover price jumped to £8.99, but higher page counts, quality paper stock and high-spec photography have resulted in a 40% increase in newsstand sales and a 400% increase in subscription acquisitions, bringing a 39% increase in subscription revenues.

The newly luxe feel of olive is playing well to an audience that cares less about finding the best lasagne to feed their family and more about elevating their everyday life. “We can see it really resonated with our audience,” Barclay said. “£8.99 is a higher price point, but you’re getting a much richer, thicker publication… it offers people an enriching experience. It’s a really beautiful read.”

Whether it’s providing expert-led podcasts, recipe videos, social-first myth-busting content or premium print, Barclay said her role has evolved in ways she would never have been able to predict 18 years ago as editorial assistant.

“But I feel really lucky to have been a part of that journey,” she said. “They’re all things that are really editorially rich. They’re all about storytelling. They’re all about reaching the audience on new and exciting platforms. It’s been an amazing time to have a career in editorial.”

Listen to the full episode in this week’s episode of The Publisher Podcast, available wherever you find podcasts.

Good reads:

From magazine to outdoor media ecosystem: the evolution of Outside Inc

Outside magazine once set the gold-standard for long-form journalism about life outdoors. These days, it sits at the centre of a media ecosystem designed to inspire and guide people from the first tentative steps of their journeys outdoors to celebrating their active-lifestyle achievements.

MediaVoices • Peter Houston

For teens, a print renaissance might be afoot.

In the coming months, a spate of new magazines will emerge, targeting an unexpected audience: teenagers.

Columbia Journalism Review

Australia banned under-16s from social media six months ago. Here is what it actually did to the news

An Australian publisher's view on the law the UK is about to copy, and the lessons worth learning before you do

Journalism UK

Time and Axios turn AI prominence into advertising revenue

Time COO Mark Howard says the US newsbrand is generating revenue from an invisible version of its website that can be read by AI bots.

Press Gazette • Dominic Ponsford

Research: Some consumers are willing to pay, unwilling to commit

News publishers often assume a consumer’s willingness to subscribe equals their willingness to pay. Experiments by The Washington Post and a European news company trial show less commitment means more buy-in from paying readers.

International News Media Association (INMA)

Like The Wind Magazine: a phenomenal publication crosses the Atlantic to launch a USA edition. 

The Mr. Magazine™ Interview with Simon Freeman, Publisher & Editor-in-Chief.

Mr. Magazine

OpenAI’s ad business has stopped looking like a pilot and started looking a lot like Meta (and Google)

Last month, OpenAI debuted its cost-per-action ads, and they are now courting local small businesses. Which ad businesses are at risk and what should they do?

International News Media Association (INMA)

Welcome to the Publisher Newsletter by Media Voices: profiling the people and products powering publishing.

The Publisher Summit & Awards: Masterclasses

Our flagship Publisher Summit is being held in just under two weeks, on July 8th at HUCKSTER, Paddington, London. There’s air conditioning and an outdoor terrace, for those of you sweating it out now and wishing for a cool breeze…

This year’s Publisher Summit brings together newsletter, app, podcast, print and event case studies, showcasing what leading publishers are doing to grow audiences and revenue.

As it becomes ever more difficult to acquire audiences and revenue through search and social, building and strengthening direct audience connections will be vital to surviving and thriving as publishers.

Our Summit Masterclasses run in parallel to the main agenda. Attendance is free but pre-booking is advised - spaces are filling up quickly as they’ve opened to ticket-holders this week.

P.S. Ticket prices rise after this Friday, so book now to secure the best value rate.

The Publisher Summit 2026 Masterclasses

Podcast metrics that matter

Lead: Chris Stone, Executive Producer, New Statesman, Founder of Podcast Strategy Weekly and Podcast Crew

Understanding the data from podcasts can be a minefield. Using those metrics to inform key decisions is another challenge. What matters and why, and how does that change depending on your aims?

Chris Stone has spent over a decade immersed in podcast metrics, from his work at the New Statesman, The Telegraph and the Evening Standard. He regularly shares his findings in his newsletter Podcast Strategy Weekly.

In this Masterclass, Chris will share what metrics matter at different stages of your funnel; for growth, retention, conversion and monetisation. He'll guide you about which specific metrics help inform specific decisions across both audio-only and video podcasts.

From reach to relationships: How to turn audiences into loyal - and paying - communities

Lead: Sarah Ebner, Editorial expert, consultant and writer (ex Financial Times, Telegraph, The Times, BBC)

As platforms become less reliable and AI reshapes how audiences discover content, media organisations need new ways to build loyalty and long-term value.

In this practical session, Sarah will explore how publishers and individuals can create stronger audience relationships through engagement, habit, community and distinctive voice — and what this means for subscriptions, membership, advertising and events.

The session will look at why the future is about building better audiences, not just bigger ones — and how media brands can adapt to a changing landscape where people increasingly follow people, not institutions.

Pod vs. Vod: A framework for evaluating video podcasting

Lead: Paul Doyle, Director of Video Strategy & Delivery, Immediate

The 'pivot to video' has been top-of-mind for any publisher with podcasts. With platforms from YouTube, Spotify and Apple investing in video podcast-specific capabilities, do audio-only shows risk getting left behind?

Paul Doyle leads video strategy and delivery at Immediate Media. They have three types of podcast: audio-only, video-adjacent, and video-first. In this Masterclass, Paul will outline how they approach video podcasting, from video-first workflows to the benefits of having video assets.

However, there are also challenges with video. Paul will give you a framework to think about your own shows, and where there may be benefits. Crucially, he will also help evaluate where podcasts are best left as just podcasts.

Your newsletter retention playbook

Lead: Jake MccGwire, Head of Product, beehiiv

Too many publishers know too little about their subscribers which directly impacts their ability to better monetize and retain those readers. Outside of a few questions at signup and the occasional survey, most publishers are flying blind without clear data on reader preferences, demographics, and changing behaviors. By creating survey habits and automations that seamlessly become part of the reader experience, advanced newsletter operators are executing programs that have business wide impact.

In this masterclass beehiiv's Head of Product, Jake MccGwire will share best practices to turn your email program into a data generating, reader retaining machine.

Tickets are excellent value for an industry event, with lessons applicable across many different products, so why not bring the team?

Look who else is joining us:

The Publisher Summit & Awards supporters:

beehiiv — The newsletter platform built for growth

Create, grow, and monetize your newsletter with easy-to-use newsletter tools. Build email newsletters and websites without any coding.

www.beehiiv.com

Pugpig

Launch deeply engaging mobile apps in no time, with zero fuss. Pugpig is the mobile publishing platform that powers The Boston Globe, Conde Nast & more.

Pugpig | The mobile publishing platform for newspapers, magazines and more

Warners Publishing Services

We provide outstanding customer service with highly skilled and experienced marketing teams that work with you to deliver tangible results, based on your objectives, in a friendly, approachable and transparent way.

warnerspublishing.co.uk

WoodWing

WoodWing's innovative software solutions boost your business operations across content creation, publishing, quality and information management, and more.

www.woodwing.com

Welcome to the Publisher Newsletter by Media Voices: profiling the people and products powering publishing.

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Inside Leading Publishers' Engagement Strategies

Retention and community are top of mind for every newsroom right now. So how are leading publishers actually building reader habit?

We've compiled real engagement case studies and practical takeaways into one playbook.

• How publishers turn passive readers into a participating community

• Formats that earn repeat visits, without heavy moderation

• How interactive experiences support subscription growth

From magazine to outdoor media ecosystem: the evolution of Outside Inc

Outside magazine once set the gold-standard for long-form journalism about life outdoors. These days, it sits at the centre of a media ecosystem designed to inspire and guide people from the first tentative steps of their journeys outdoors to celebrating their active-lifestyle achievements.

This week on The Publisher Podcast, I spoke with Heather Dietrick, Chief Media Officer at Outside Media Inc. When I said I knew Outside – an almost 50-year old magazine brand started by Rolling Stones’ Jan Wenner, from my J-school studies back in the 90s – she quickly explained: “It’s no longer just a magazine – we have evolved into a fully integrated outdoor ecosystem with a single mission: to get people outside.”

That ‘ecosystem’ includes 15 media brands in the outdoor world – from backcountry travel to mountain biking – plus a host of tracking, fitness and mapping apps, real-world events, travel services and a film and TV channel. In total, the business runs 25 brands across outdoor sports and healthy living.

Dietrick said: “We really think about us being the first stop where we are sparking inspiration and also providing the tools and services to help people get outside, have a great time outside, and then come back to us for more.”

She draws a comparison with the New York Times’ strategy to deliver more than news. Where the NYT has developed a range of lifestyle products to run parallel to its news coverage, Outside has invested in apps that support its core content categories of outdoor lifestyle, healthy living and active sports.

Dietrick thinks Outside’s model diverges from what the NYT has done in the deep connection between its content and its apps. “As the New York Times has pushed into games like Wordle, that connection starts to pull apart,” she said. “It’s still a very powerful business model… all of those metrics that we care about in engagement, conversion go up and to the right. That is true for us, but the utility and the content are highly related.” 

From interest to activation

Outside’s whole offer rests on a customer journey designed to move people from general interest to active participation. However, Dietrick said there can be several routes between inspirational content and an app subscription.

She explained: “You might come into the content to learn about a new activity, you might watch someone else’s story of their incredible ski line or their trail run, but that content doesn’t just push you right into that utility to get activated.”

In contrast to a pure app-conversion strategy, the publisher offers a content-only digital subscription that provides online access to 10 publications for $60 a year. “We tell people where to go, we give them training plans, we give them nutrition advice, gear is a super important part of that. All of those combined help you get ready to then step into that next step in your journey.”

Dietrick describes the next step as planning and that’s where Outside Inc’s next subscription tier comes in. For $90 a year, subscribers get access to all the content, including a quarterly print edition of Outside magazine, but also several mapping apps. 

Noting the different points on the customer journey, she said: “If you are not yet that advanced into our ecosystem, you could subscribe to just our content bundle. Or if you’re quite advanced in an activity and want to engage with our mapping apps, you can subscribe at that level.”

Community content

From inspiration to preparation, planning to activation, Outside Inc supports its users with content designed to spark ideas and support training, and the utilities that help them achieve their goals. After that, the final phase in the customer journey kicks in: celebration.

“That’s the end of that loop for us,” said Dietrick, “but it’s really important. We have a really big platform and a big audience to speak to. It is even more powerful when we can force multiply ourselves with our audience.”

Subscribers can view and share content through their apps and the site’s content feed and Dietrick described the content shared by users as part of the ‘inspiration loop’, with users motivated by seeing friends and family sharing successes and tips on how they have met their goals.

She said specialisms within the community are important. “Each has their own identity for the user, and we lean into them, and we go deep in the vertical,” she said. However, she also sees real value for the audience in thinking of themselves as part of the broader Outside network.

“It’s very likely that if you are into one outdoor activity, you’re probably into another, or you’re at least curious about another,” she explained. “You might be a double black-diamond skier, but you’re just mountain-bike curious, or you do it at a simpler level. We try in each of those categories to have something for everyone, wherever they are in that journey.”

Beyond inspirational content or training plans, Dietrick said travel has become increasingly important. “We really think about how we offer not just advice on where to go, but the actual ability to curate an itinerary and book it on site. A lot [of people], especially new entrants, aren’t thinking about their personal best record, they’re thinking about where they can explore, where there is a new adventure.”

Revenue mix

Outside’s mix of content and utility is paying dividends. According to a February 2026 Adweek article, the platform was profitable in 2025 on revenue of $125 million, a 23% year-on-year increase.

About 40% of that total is advertising, compared with 70% when Outside Inc. first began acquiring media brands. Dietrick said advertising is still important and growing, noting a shift away from endemic advertising – brands closely related to outdoor pursuits – and non-endemic – general consumer brands that want to reach audiences interested in outdoor pursuits.

However, recurring revenue – consumer subscriptions to content and apps, affiliate ecommerce, event services software and travel – accounts for 60% of Outside’s turnover. Looking at the growing importance of consumer cash in Outside’s revenue mix, Dietrick said that while advertising revenue is extremely important, it lacks the one-to-one relationship that a consumer focus brings.

“You’re in more control of that relationship than any other revenue stream,” she said. “Really thinking about consumer revenue opportunities has been a really important focus, so that we’re not subject to the whims of the ad market and to the growth of the big platforms – Meta, Amazon and Google.”

Dietrick was also optimistic that there is a growing audience for good, well-produced content.

“The form factor might change. The delivery mechanism has certainly changed the revenue model,” she said. “I still believe in the power of that deeply reported piece, a beautifully worded 10,000 word piece, and that’s still reflected in some of the work we do.

“But we also recognise that we have to meet the audience where they are, when they are, which means all sorts of other form factors in the mix.”

Listen to the full episode in this week’s episode of The Publisher Podcast, available wherever you find podcasts.

Good reads:

How The Guardian turns pop-up newsletter readers into regular subscribers

The World Behind the Cup is the latest short-run newsletter series from The Guardian. The paper’s Head of Newsletters, Toby Moses, explains how the publisher’s strategy for pop-ups - and newsletters more generally - has evolved over the five years that he has been in charge.

MediaVoices • Peter Houston

Against ‘beige’: Media strategist Dmitry Shishkin’s non-negotiables for the AI era

After 21 years at the BBC and senior roles at Culture Trip and Ringier, Dmitry Shishkin now advises major media organisations. Here he argues that the industry’s most urgent problem isn’t AI, declining trust or commercial pressure – it’s the inability to accurately name what’s actually wrong.

FIPP • Joanna Cummings

Newsletter market in 2026: $10 per month is default price but not ceiling

The average paid newsletter costs $10 per month regardless of size, according to analysis of thousands of publications on Beehiiv.

Press Gazette • Charlotte Tobitt

Spotify launches over 650 narrated magazine articles

Spotify continues to expand into new customer offerings for premium subscribers, sharpening their value proposition.

Forbes • Frank Racioppi

The post-search publishing playbook for finding and keeping audiences

The biggest puzzle for publishers today is where to find audiences and how to keep them. How to meet this challenge was the focus of the latest AOP CRUNCH event, writes AOP’s Richard Reeves.

InPublishing

AI Is eating publisher traffic. Sky News and Daily Mail are both dealing with it.

Three publishers, the same collapsing traffic model, each at a different stage of replacing it.

The Media Stack

How should news organizations label their AI use for audiences? New studies suggest some answers

Plus: How TikTok users gauge credibility, and good news about the viability of a shift away from commercial journalism.

Nieman Lab

The Atlantic beefs up its video podcasts

One of America’s oldest magazines is investing in video after seeing notable growth in its audience in recent months.

www.semafor.com/article/06/21/2026/the-atlantic-beefs-up-video-podcasts

Welcome to the Publisher Newsletter by Media Voices: profiling the people and products powering publishing.

Three perspectives on zero-click search

Like every big story, the arc of the zero-click narrative varies depending on who is telling it. Each of the three sets of protagonists in this tale – search users, Google and content creators – think about zero-click very differently, as Peter Houston explains in this extract from our new report, The Zero-Click Content Shift. 

Understanding the different perspectives is important for publishers, both in helping them understand the forces shaping the search ecosystem and helping them decide which digital publishing strategies will best counter the zero-click threat.

The user perspective: utility

Google announced its AI Overviews search feature at its I/O developer conference in May 2024. About a week later, the company’s CEO, Sundar Pichai, sat down with The Verge’s Nilay Patel to talk about all things search and the future of the web.

His line on introducing AI into Google Search was that it was all about creating value for users – ‘letting Google do the Googling for you’. He said: “The summary we are providing clearly adds value and helps them look at things they may not have otherwise thought about.”

The overall quality of information provided by AI Overviews is up for debate, but the presence of answers at the top of search results pages clearly adds convenience for users.

It’s difficult to fault Google on their value-add logic. Many websites have become difficult to use with intrusive features from cookie consents to massive advertising banners and popups making it ever harder to access articles. As Barry Adams says, “There’s a lot of friction interacting with the web, especially websites you haven’t visited before.”

Nic Newman, author of the Reuters Institute’s Journalism and Technology Trends and Predictions report 2026 says: “Publishers face new competition from AI answer engines and next generation browsers that are able to summarise and remix content in a way that provides great utility for audiences.”

The shift to answer engines is something Clara Soteras spotlights, noting that short search queries – one or two words – are less likely to spawn an AI Overview. People asking more complex, conversational questions: using four words and including interrogative terms like ‘why’ or ‘how’ increases the likelihood of AI Overviews being returned.

She points out that other chatbots like ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity AI are serving a similar purpose for users, but that the percentage of referral traffic they are delivering is only 0.2%; tiny in comparison to Google Search.

Citations in AI Overviews are still driving traffic to publisher websites from searchers who want to see more information, but also from users fact-checking AI answers; a rise in search traffic correlates with the launch of ChatGPT. Google has also claimed that users who click through from AI Overviews are more engaged, but there is limited evidence to support this as yet.

The bottom line for users, and the perspective that publishers need to pay attention to, is that improved utility is welcomed.

The Google perspective: users first, publishers second

From the outside, Google’s perspective on zero-click is complicated, except that it’s all about making money for Google.

On the one hand, Google just wants to keep people using its services. The days of ‘Do no evil’ are long gone and Google, under the Alphabet umbrella, is all about winning in an increasingly competitive AI race.

AI Overviews leverage the company’s LLM models to keep users inside the Google advertising ecosystem as much as its search ecosystem.

“Google doesn’t give a shit about your website,” says Barry Adams. “It cares only about its users, and it will do whatever it can to keep users on Google. If that means throwing three quarters of websites into the meat grinder, so be it.”

However, the search giant is walking a tightrope between keeping users happy by increasing utility with AI and avoiding killing off the content creators that feed its new answer engine. In a September 2025 interview with MediaVoices, People Inc. CEO Neil Vogel framed the problem Google is facing with publishers.

He said: “Google’s job is to answer your query however they see fit… The issue that has to be solved for publishers is how do we get compensated for this?”

Sundar Pichai acknowledged this issue immediately after the AI Overviews rollout in his May 2024 interview with The Verge, saying: “If there isn’t a rich ecosystem making unique and useful content, what are you putting together and organising?”

While it’s very easy to question just how much Google cares about publisher content, the search giant is making some moves to deliver more clicks from users’ AI search experience. In updates announced in May 2026, responses in both AI Overviews and AI Mode will highlight whether summaries include information from publications the user subscribes to.

According to a report from NiemanLab, Google claims that in early testing, people were ‘significantly more likely’ to click through to a webpage that had its “Subscribed” label. It also said the new citation feature has been designed to help users ‘quickly access’ content they trust and get more value from their subscriptions.

The company is also piloting paid partnerships and licensing deals with major publishers, including Der Spiegel, The Guardian and The Washington Post; exploring opt-out controls that will allow publishers to opt out of AI Overviews without losing search visibility; and experimenting with personalisation that will identify users’ preferred sources.

The balancing act for Google is to keep users happy, but try to avoid choking off the supply of quality content it needs to serve meaningful answers.

Report: The Zero-Click Content Shift

What is zero-click search, and does it really pose an existential threat to the publishing business? Our new report aims to answer exactly that question.

MediaVoices • Peter Houston

The publisher perspective: seeking clarity

The publisher perspective on zero-click search is, to say the least, polarised.

On team ‘Chicken Little’, there are publishers who genuinely see removing the need for users to click through to their content from search as a ‘death blow’. Publishers heavily dependent on referral traffic and associated programmatic revenues have already seen the sky fall in.

Team ‘Déjà Vu’ sees the fall in referral traffic as the catalyst for just another exercise in managing decline, adding search to a list of shrinking distribution opportunities that already includes print and social media platforms.

There are few, if any, publishers that see the introduction of AI Overviews as a positive; even fewer who think anyone can put the genie back in the bottle. However, there is a consensus building around the idea that publishers will have to adapt to counter the inevitable decline of search referral traffic.

Adapting means different things to different publishers, but giving up on past click addiction is central. Moves to maximise referrals from AI Overviews are on the to-do list, but there is varying confidence in just how effective that will be; better to build direct relationships and revenue than rely on traffic from AI citations.

One other point that almost all publishers agree on is the unfairness of tech companies training their LLMs on their content without permission or compensation. Some of the biggest have done deals to license their content. But, regardless of size, the industry agrees that every AI company has a responsibility to compensate publishers for the content used to train their LLMs, or in Google’s case, allow them to opt out of AI overviews without also opting out of search visibility.

In a March 2026 article for InPublishing, Sajeeda Merali, chair of the UK publisher association, PPA, wrote that the deployment of generative AI has raised fundamentally different issues from previous waves of digital innovation because it relies on the “systematic theft and reuse of copyrighted works at scale.”

Sajeeda was very clear that the PPA’s advocacy is not about resisting technological progress or limiting innovation. “The goal,” she wrote, “was to secure a predictable, pro-competition framework, one which creates growth for publishers and AI moving forward.”

The best bet for publishers is to campaign for a more level playing field, while abandoning any business model predicated on third-party traffic referrals.

This is an extract from our new report, The Zero Click Content Shift.

This report was researched and written in association with WoodWing.

WoodWing empowers publishing ecosystems by uniting technology with deep industry expertise. For 25+ years, we’ve helped teams create, manage, and deliver content across print and digital channels with greater efficiency and consistency. Our portfolio spans multi-channel production, digital assets, quality, knowledge, and information management. Founded in 2000, we operate globally from our headquarters in the Netherlands.  

Learn more about WoodWing’s publishing solutions at woodwing.com