Welcome to the latest season of The Publisher Podcast, bringing you the best of the main stage sessions from The Publisher Summit.

Big listener numbers make podcasts attractive commercially, but a podcast with the right listeners can still see incredible commercial success with the right combination of editorial expertise and marketing.

Energy Voice Out Loud from DC Thomson has seen consistent commercial success, making six figures from listener numbers in the hundreds.

Senior Marketing Manager Emma Lamont and News Editor Erikka Askeland talk about how the editorial team work with clients to craft episodes that perform well with listeners, how they make podcasts an attractive proposition for sponsors, and how taking the podcast on the road with Energy Voice Live has created high-impact moments for their audience.

Thanks to the Summit's premium sponsors; Pugpig and Beehiiv, and to the digital sponsors; qwoted, Adestra, Woodwing and Warners for their support.

Welcome to the latest season of The Publisher Podcast, bringing you the best of the main stage sessions from The Publisher Summit.

This week’s episode features Tobi Oredein, CEO and Founder of Black Ballad, the lifestyle publication for and by Black women in Britain.

Tobi talked about how the brand’s transformation into an independent media and data company was driven by its membership strategy. Black Ballad today has a portfolio of events, from its flagship Black Ballad Weekender, attracting over 2,000 Black women across two days, to more intimate experiential events which have proved to be strong membership drivers.

Thanks to the Summit's premium sponsors; Pugpig and Beehiiv, and to the digital sponsors; qwoted, Adestra, Woodwing and Warners for their support.

Welcome to the latest season of The Publisher Podcast, bringing you the best of the main stage sessions from The Publisher Summit.

This week’s episode is a panel on how publishers are using newsletters to supercharge other areas of a publishing business. 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.

Freelance journalist Chris Sutcliffe moderates this panel featuring POLITICO’s Senior Executive Editor Kate Day, The Guardian’s Head of Newsletters Toby Moses, and Beehiiv’s Head of Product Jake MccGwire. They explore 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.

Thanks to the Summit's premium sponsors; Pugpig and Beehiiv, and to the digital sponsors; qwoted, Adestra, Woodwing and Warners for their support.

Welcome to the latest season of The Publisher Podcast, bringing you the best of the main stage sessions from The Publisher Summit.

This week’s episode features Liz Wynn, Chief Supporter Revenue Officer at The Guardian, interviewed by Craig Llewelyn-Williams, SVP for Customer Strategy at Woodwing.

Everyone is feeling the effects of industry headwinds like falling traffic, AI summaries and unreliable social media referrals. The message is clear for those seeking growth: building direct audiences is a top priority.

The Guardian has seen heavy investment in apps, newsletters, podcasts and its websites over the past few years, from key hires to app launches like Feast. This is paying off in both audience growth and revenue, with their email subscribers alone going from 1 million to 8 million in just 2 years.

Liz has helped drive the business to over 1.4m recurring supporters. She talks about the importance of direct connections, how the Guardian’s product strategy supports those relationships, and what works across different geographies, particularly in the context of the Guardian’s US expansion.

Thanks to the Summit's premium sponsors; Pugpig and Beehiiv, and to the digital sponsors; qwoted, Adestra, Woodwing and Warners for their support.

Welcome back to the latest season of The Publisher Podcast, bringing you the best of the main stage sessions from The Publisher Summit.

This week’s episode is a panel on how publishers are focusing on quality over quantity for long-term, sustainable audience relationships - something which was echoed throughout other sessions on the day. As pressures on traffic and discovery grow, coupled with the bombardment of AI ‘slop’, there is an opportunity to lean into a true quality over quantity ethos and reap the benefits.

Press Gazette’s Charlotte Tobitt is the panel moderator, and she’s joined by Maire Bonheim, Head of Newsletters at The Telegraph, Malcolm Coles, Audience Growth Director at Hearst, and Anna Sbuttoni, Deputy Head of Digital at the Times and Sunday Times. They share how actively embracing publishing fewer but higher-quality articles and newsletters has had a measurable impact on audience growth, conversion, and subscriber retention.

The panel is introduced by Beth Ashton, Chief Strategy Officer at qwoted.

Thanks to the Summit's premium sponsors; Pugpig and Beehiiv, and to the digital sponsors; qwoted, Adestra, Woodwing and Warners for their support.

Welcome back to the latest season of The Publisher Podcast, bringing you the best of the main stage sessions from The Publisher Summit.

This week's guest is Liz Settle, MD of Good Housekeeping. Liz joined Good Housekeeping in 2023 with a ‘change brief’ to ready Good Housekeeping for the future. Over the past few years, she’s bridged the gap between customer needs and editorial output, broken down print and digital silos, built intergenerational readership, and innovated across the print product.

In this interview recorded live on stage at The Publisher Summit, she talks about how these changes helped grow audience and revenue, and why she’s optimistic about the future of publishing.

Thanks to the Summit's premium sponsors; Pugpig and Beehiiv, and to the digital sponsors; qwoted, Adestra, Woodwing and Warners for their support.

Welcome back to the latest season of The Publisher Podcast, bringing you the best of the main stage sessions from The Publisher Summit.

This week's guest is Sarah Donaldson, co-founder of news start-up The Nerve. In a bit of a twist, this isn’t actually audio 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.

The Nerve was launched last September by a group of five former Observer journalists. In less than a week after launching, it had hit 8,000 sign-ups and more than 1,000 paying members, all without a paywall. As they turn one, they’ve continued to go from strength to strength, and significantly are now on the brink of sustainability.

Sarah talks about the opportunity they spotted to launch a news and culture brand, which audience touchpoints they decided to focus on, and why they’ve seen such early success.

Thanks to the Summit's premium sponsors; Pugpig and Beehiiv, and to the digital sponsors; qwoted, Adestra, Woodwing and Warners for their support.

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.

She 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.

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.

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.

In the final episode of this season of The Publisher Podcast, we're joined by Lily Barclay, the first Content Director of Immediate's Food Group covering BBC Good Food and olive magazine.

Lily has been with Good Food for over 18 years and has seen the brand's evolution from print only to a multiplatform and multi-brand specialist publishing group.

She talks about what separates their food brands, Immediate's new Good Food Kitchen to support digital content creation and real-world recipe testing, and leveraging ratings and reviews to build trust. She also takes us inside olive's successful print refresh, where a reduced frequency, higher quality stock and price point has rewarded them with a 40% increase in newsstand sales and 400% increase in subscriptions.

Read the key takeaways from this interview, find our weekly newsletter and more on voices.media

This week's guest on The Publisher Podcast is Heather Dietrick, Chief Media Officer at Outside Inc. 

Heather talked about the evolution of the company from 'just' a magazine to what she calls a fully integrated outdoor ecosystem, encompassing 15 media brands, events, consumer apps and travel services. What ties everything together is a mission to inspire and enable people to get outside.

She also discusses Outside Inc's revenue mix, with recurring revenue tiered around paid content and app subscriptions, which now makes up 60% of the business.

Read the key takeaways from this interview, find our weekly newsletter and more on voices.media