The stories newsrooms publish most are, article for article, the least effective, and Dmitry Shishkin thinks the fix starts with how publishers commission. 

Ten years after a piece of BBC audience research turned into the user needs model, its architect used his FIPP Congress slot in Madrid to argue that most publishers still get this the wrong way round. Shishkin, now an independent consultant after senior roles at the BBC, Culture Trip and Ringier, told the audience that topic and format are only two of publishing’s three pillars. The third, the reader’s motivation, drives subscription and loyalty metrics, and most newsrooms still leave it to instinct.

> Article for article, "update me" pieces underperform every other user need, yet newsrooms produce more of them than anything else

> Tag every piece with three things: the subtopic (personal finance, not just finance), the format (Q&A, feature, listicle, data-led) and the single user need it serves. Then commission on all three

> One dominant need per piece. An article that tries to serve every need gets a headline that can only sell one, so most readers never discover the rest

> Don't let the newsroom write its own user needs model: take the needs from audience research. At Ringier, across five countries, conversions, subscriptions and loyalty metrics all increased once teams moved to the model

Measure the angle as well as the story

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DC Thomson is a family-owned publisher headquartered in Dundee, founded in 1905 and best known outside Scotland for the Beano. Its two regional dailies are the titles in this story: The Courier in Dundee and the Press and Journal in Aberdeen. 

Graham McDougall is Head of Trading and Retention, responsible for pricing, packaging and offers across both titles and the wider portfolio. The company’s digital subscription launched in lockdown, grew by roughly 10,000 a year and last reported around 50,000 subscribers. One product inside that number is a digital-only Sports Pack, now £4.99 a month, built for readers who only wanted sport.

> Scottish publisher DC Thomson (The Courier in Dundee, the Press and Journal in Aberdeen) had one of its biggest content areas by engagement producing almost no subscriptions. Match reports and team news are commodity content any reader can find free within minutes

> The fix was a digital-only Sports Pack cut from content already in the full pack. Nothing new was commissioned and editorial was not asked to change anything. It sells in-article at £1 for the first month then £4.99, and around 95% of sales happen there rather than on the subscribe page

> Trial conversion and retention both beat the full pack. 15-20% of buyers upgrade, half of them within a month, and the rest stay on the cheaper pack. A reverse test settled the cannibalisation worry: offered both packs on the same sport articles, readers who chose the full pack converted less and churned faster

> Exclusives did the converting. When Aberdeen appointed a manager from abroad, the Press and Journal sent a reporter to his home country and nobody else had the story. The sports desks dropped Saturday match reports and Friday team news for what readers could not get elsewhere

> No deep discounts anywhere. Every trial is one paid month, the price has risen from £3 to £4.99, and readers who try to cancel are offered an annual contract paid monthly rather than a percentage off. Graham McDougall, Head of Trading and Retention: "If we drop our pants every time somebody lands on a page, it's going to be a lot harder"

Sport had the audience but none of the subscriptions

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Jess Burney is the Managing Director of Customer Marketing and Subscriptions at Immediate, the publisher behind Good Food, Radio Times and Nutracheck. She runs a team of 50 and has spent five years pivoting from a print subscription business to a digital one. Immediate now has more than 1.2 million paid subscribers, around 800,000 of them digital-only, and a mission to reach 3 million by 2030. The majority of the remaining 1.8 million are expected to come from the US, from products not yet launched and from bundling.

> UK publisher Immediate (Radio Times, Good Food, HistoryExtra) has over 1.2 million paid subscribers, around 800,000 of them digital, against a company target of 3 million by 2030

> Print subscribers were never migrated. Immediate built and bought digital products for people who had never bought a magazine: the Good Food app is at just under 200,000 from a 2022 standing start, Nutracheck at 580,000 since its 2023 acquisition

> Paywalled articles only sell if the content is genuinely must-read, and evergreen lifestyle content isn't. Good Food charges for utility instead: cook mode, planning tools, and app takeovers exclusive to subscribers

> There's no single Immediate paywall. Stickiness, response rates and build costs differ by brand, so each gets its own model, and Immediate only builds where it leads the category

> A separate commercial team holds the budget and funds products against fixed thresholds: 40-55% trial-to-paid conversion, 65-80% at the next renewal, monthly retention above 90%, and 3:1 lifetime value to acquisition cost within two years

Print was working. That was the constraint.

Immediate publishes Radio Times, Good Food, HistoryExtra and around 50 other brands, and by the early 2020s its print business was thriving. Magazines still sold well, and lockdown had been good to them, with a steep uptick in demand for copies by post. Instead of needing to rescue subscribers from a collapsing format, as many other publishers did, Immediate’s existing subscriber base was profitable, loyal, and not going anywhere fast. As Burney put it, print is still a robust format, and one the brand needed to continue to commit to. But growth is in digital, a development necessary to achieve their 3 million subscriber target. 

What’s more, the bet was that the expertise from years of building subscription expertise in print – pricing, renewals, retention, and direct marketing to a known customer file – would carry into digital even though the format would not.

New products for audiences that print never reached

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Jack Riley, Chief Customer Officer at The Observer, explains why the 233-year-old title launched with a single umbrella subscription rather than tiers, how Culture Club became a central retention bet, and why the hardest part of the build has been saying no.

> The Observer launched its first-ever digital subscription in November 2025 at £16 a month or £144 a year, with a single umbrella tier covering print, digital, audio and Culture Club benefits from spring this year.
> Culture Club, a set of arts and culture perks worth more than £800, is given to every subscriber instead of being held back for a premium tier.
> Early data shows subscribers who engage with multiple parts of the product, from Nigel Slater's recipes to the puzzles to podcasts, are significantly less likely to cancel.
> The Salt Path investigation and its podcast and documentary afterlife have been the single biggest growth catalyst since launch.

Lessons:
> A single, transparent subscription can beat early tiering when you are reintroducing a brand to its audience.
> Retention comes from breadth of engagement across a product, not from any one flagship story.
> Old brand equity can bridge readers into new daily habits, but only if the product is built to earn that habit.

When Jack Riley joined The Observer in 2025, he inherited separate journalistic businesses rather than one. Tortoise Media built digital infrastructure for audio, events and membership, but not the volume or breadth of content a newspaper needs.

The Observer brought a newsroom with genuine authority and a 233-year history, but none of the digital scaffolding that sits around it. “We really had to design a lot of stuff almost from scratch in order to bring it to life,” Riley says.

The consolidation happened in two waves. The first was making sure the Sunday paper kept getting out of a newly combined newsroom. The second was an open-access sampling site throughout the summer, used to build registration and newsletter lists ahead of a proper launch. What followed was an intense six months of building and prototyping: new iOS and Android apps for phone and tablet, a full website redesign, brand refresh and the subscription infrastructure underneath it, including analytics, paywall logic, access controls and integrations with both the Guardian’s print systems and Tortoise’s existing membership base.

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Rachel Shields, UK Editorial Director at The Sun, and Sarah Ransome, Principal Product Manager at The Sun, explain the commercial logic behind Sun Club, what a year of subscriber data has revealed, and where the product goes next.

> The Sun launched Sun Club in 2025 as a £1.99 freemium membership, layering subscription revenue and first-party reader data on top of an already large free audience

> A year in, 65% of members are women, and TikTok has opened a genuinely new audience: those subscribers are 85% female and 15 years younger than the average member

> First-week app activity is the strongest predictor of long-term retention. The most loyal members read over 100 articles a week, almost entirely in the app

Lessons:
> Value-driven perks are the core of the proposition, and for this audience they're the retention tool that matters

> Freemium can serve advertising and subscription goals at once, because a known, logged-in audience strengthens both

We thought people would pay for quality journalism, and they did

Like most news publishers, The Sun had been challenged by the decline in referral traffic. That brought the loyal core digital audience into sharper focus. The question was whether tabloid readers could be persuaded to pay for digital journalism, and what the product would need to look like to make that happen.

Rachel Shields says: “We were confident that UK readers were far more willing to pay for quality content now than they were a decade ago. At the same time, while we had huge reach, we wanted to turn those anonymous clicks into known users, and create a richer experience based on their preferences.”

Research indicates that as audiences feel swamped by AI-generated content, the perceived value of verified, quality journalism is rising. The launch of Sun Club a year ago was well timed.

“We’re still ‘the People’s Paper’ and are conscious that there is a strong proportion of our journalism which should remain free online, around big health or political stories, for example,” says Shields.

A year on, Sun Club has exceeded initial targets. Part of that success is down to the value-driven membership proposition, which combines Sun content and a raft of unique money-saving offers.

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FIPP's latest data shows a digital subscription market growing 24.7% and concentrating fast. The winners are bundling, embedding, and reducing their dependence on search. The losers are still renting their audiences from Google.

Nine international publishers, Le Monde, El País, The Irish Times, Politiken, Corriere della Sera and De Standaard among them, now sell subscription bundles that include access to The New York Times alongside their own journalism, according to Nieman Lab. The arrangement suits both sides. Local publishers add internationally recognised reporting to their value proposition without the cost of producing it. The New York Times Company extends its subscriber reach into markets where direct acquisition is slower and more expensive.

One of those nine publishers, De Standaard, sit inside Mediahuis, whose “essential subscription” is the clearest worked example of the strategy. As I wrote for Audiencers, Mediahuis has built a bundle that wraps journalism, e-books, masterclasses, a hiking and cycling app, and access to The New York Times into a single subscription. The early data is compelling: activated users churn 26.5% less, and the bundle is engineered to push subscribers up from the basic tier to a premium one priced at roughly double. The New York Times partnership is one component of that bundle, not a curiosity bolted on top.

That arrangement is the clearest signal of where the market is heading. FIPP’s latest Subscription Report counts 53 million digital-only subscriptions across 206 titles, and the headline 24.7% growth conceals a sharp split. Publishers that have built direct audience relationships, bundled product ecosystems and cross-title access are accelerating. Those still dependent on single-title subscriptions and search-driven acquisition are losing ground, in some cases losing subscribers outright.

The rapid expansion of AI into search has sharpened the divide. Referral traffic that publishers relied on for audience acquisition and advertising revenue is compressing. Publishers that were renting their audiences from Google are finding the lease harder to renew. The response from the strongest performers is consistent: own the relationship, deepen the product, reduce dependence on external distribution.

No company illustrates that logic more clearly than the New York Times Company, which is why the cross-publisher bundles matter: they are central to the strategy, not a side experiment.

The New York Times is no longer just competing. It’s embedding

The New York Times Company now reports 12.21 million digital-only subscribers and stopped reporting title-level numbers this year. The second decision reframes what kind of business the company believes it is in. The New York Times is no longer a newspaper with digital products attached. It is a subscription business that happens to include a newspaper, alongside Games, Cooking, Wirecutter and The Athletic, bundled into a single proposition designed to make cancellation feel like losing several things at once.

The cross-publisher bundles extend the same logic outward. As AI search compresses referral traffic, the value of a subscription with multiple compelling reasons to stay increases. Bundles reduce churn inside a single portfolio. Cross-publisher bundles spread that logic across the whole market and position the New York Times Company as the connective tissue of other publishers’ subscription strategies, not just its own.

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We interviewed Johannes Vogel, Chief Product & Revenue Officer at stern (published by RTL Deutschland) about how they relaunched a subscription offering from scratch, with teams & systems designed for digital reader revenue.

> stern, published by RTL Deutschland, had been built as what Chief Product & Revenue Officer Johannes Vogel calls "a portfolio machine", optimised for mass reach with the distinct identities of stern, GEO and Capital dissolved into digital scale. Workable for advertising, fatal for subscriptions

> Weekly pricing beat monthly on conversion, especially among readers with little prior attachment to the brand. The app stores went back to monthly after weekly renewal prompts created friction

> GEO and Capital now outperform on both conversion and retention, because a sharply defined brand profile answers a specific reader need rather than a general one

Lessons:
> For a general interest publisher, personalisation is not a feature — it will be the product

> The article that converts is not always the one that retains. Content consistency matters more than acquisition volume

When Johannes Vogel, Chief Product & Revenue Officer, joined stern in late 2023, the digital operation wasn’t obviously broken. Traffic was significant, the brands were well-known, and the technology was functional. The problem ran deeper.

The entire organisation had been built on a portfolio model with its core business being mass-reach advertising. “It was a portfolio machine,” Vogel says. “The important thing was not the individual title or the distinctive brand — it was the massive reach.” The distinct editorial identities of stern, GEO and Capital had been quietly dissolved in the pursuit of digital scale.

For advertising, that was a manageable trade-off. For subscriptions, it was fatal. A reader revenue model only works if you are offering something specific enough that an individual reader will pay for it and, importantly, keep paying. stern’s digital setup had spent years doing the opposite.

Subscription sales sat in a separate silo from editorial and product, with few shared goals and little shared accountability. Vogel and editor-in-chief Gregor Peter Schmitz decided early that there was no point trying to reform what existed. “We had the big chance to build a new team,” Vogel says. “We could work on a new philosophy and a new culture.” They started with seven people, one business, and product organisation.

Building the team

Seven became 75, now heading toward 100. The priority among those early hires was product managers, UX/UI designers, data analysts, software engineers, and subscription marketing specialists. In the editorial areas, the focus was more an transformation the organisation toward a digital-first mindset and way of working. The journalism already existed across three established brands. What was missing was the capability to build, iterate and measure a digital product around it. A subscription business requires product thinking, data infrastructure and commercial mechanics that most legacy editorial operations had never needed to develop.

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One of Europe’s largest publishers is bundling hiking apps, e-books and masterclasses alongside its journalism. Matthijs van de Peppel, Group B2C Strategy Director at Mediahuis, explains the strategy — and what the data is showing.

> Mediahuis, one of Europe's largest publishers, has built an 'essential subscription' that bundles its journalism with hiking apps, e-books, masterclasses and the New York Times

> The bundle is organised in three layers, Inform, Guide and Enable, and tailored by brand rather than by individual subscriber. The New York Times sits with the premium titles, the RouteYou hiking app with the regional and Belgian ones

> Subscribers who activated RouteYou churn 26.5% less over 12 weeks. 170,000 have activated it, and 49% of eligible subscribers used it at least once last year

> The perception gap is the whole challenge. 52% of subscribers think RouteYou is a valuable addition, rising to 82% among those who have actually used it. The product works, but only once people try it

> Stay within one degree of separation from your journalism. The New York Times works because these titles cover international affairs, e-books because they review books, RouteYou because they write about the outdoors. Invented connections don't stick

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We sat down with Joshi Herrmann, founder of The Mill, a UK-based digital publisher known for its award-winning, high-quality local news newsletters. He discussed what an “overwhelmingly reader-driven” revenue strategy means for their business:
-> Cities are chosen based on having the right person to pioneer the launch. Herrmann looks for someone who loves their city and believes in narrative journalism
-> Funds, when needed, have been from individuals who care about journalism, not firms with processes and exit timelines
-> The company has a model that prioritizes readers over traffic and quality over volume

> The Mill launched in Manchester in 2020 on the bet that people would pay for proper local journalism if you actually gave them proper local journalism. Six cities later it has around 13,000 paying subscribers and 175,000 on free lists

> Founder Joshi Herrmann priced it at roughly double what most Substack newsletters charged. Quality over volume only works if the price says so too

> Advertising is about 5% of revenue, by choice. As Herrmann puts it, "if you're reader-funded, your incentive is to give quality to those readers"

> Cities aren't chosen by market size or demographics. The determining factor is finding one person who loves the place and believes in narrative journalism, which outweighs picking a bigger city

> Each city is expected to break even within two to three years, and Manchester and Sheffield already have. The funding came from individuals who care about journalism rather than funds with exit timelines

“Proper local journalism”

Joshi Herrmann launched The Mill in 2020 with a simple bet: people would pay for proper local journalism if you actually gave them proper local journalism. Four years later, he’s got around 13,000 paying subscribers across six cities and is proving that the UK’s regional newspaper groups have been getting it wrong for two decades.

The Manchester Evening News was publishing stories about Piers Morgan. The Liverpool Echo was chasing whatever TV drama was trending that week. Across Britain’s major cities, regional newspapers that once employed hundreds of journalists and broke real stories had become traffic farms covered in programmatic ads, churning out whatever might get clicks.

“The executives in charge of these amazing media companies were trashing these brands so comprehensively and letting down local readers in the process,” Herrmann says. “That annoyed me, but it also felt like an opportunity to prove that they were doing it wrong.”

Trading ads for readers

“In local news in the UK, there had been a focus on advertising revenue rather than subscription revenue for a long time.” “The switch to digital had fundamentally been a switch from making most of your money in print from advertising to making most of your money from advertising in a digital setting. And I was aware that wasn’t working as a model.”

Go to any regional newspaper website, and you’d see the result. Dozens of stories that had nothing to do with the city. Websites plastered with terrible ads. Content designed purely to drive traffic volume rather than serve readers.

“If I thought that was an insane situation for a high-quality local newspaper,” Herrmann says, “then I knew that lots of other people would agree with me.”

Lockdown launch

The timing was accidental. Herrmann had been in the Czech Republic, planning to write a book about his family and the Holocaust. The pandemic killed that plan and he ended up back in the UK helping his sister and spending time in the garden and wondering what to do next.

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This summary from The Audiencers' Festival in London 2025 was originally published in John's The Media Stack newsletter.

At the Audiencers’ Festival in London, a recurring theme emerged from sessions with executives across leading publishers, audience strategy is undergoing a fundamental redefinition. In an era where platform referral traffic is declining, and digital advertising economics remain volatile, subscription models are under pressure not only to grow but to endure.

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