Future of Media Awards 2025 shortlist revealed
Plus interviews with Immediate Media CEO Sean Cornwell and AI start-up Prorata's chief business officer Annelies Jansen
Welcome to this week’s Press Gazette Future of Media newsletter on Thursday, 10 July brought to you in association with Wright’s Media – the premier global content licensing agency with 25 years of industry experience guiding publishing clients.
There appears to be a couple of reasonably honourable generative AI companies and a plethora of thieves and shysters.
Prorata falls into the former camp and is actively engaged with publishers offering them a share of advertising revenue. It even has investment from Daily Mail owner DMG Media.
Behind Prorata is the, to my mind, obvious truth that unless your AI model is fed with reliable content legally sourced, your entire business is built on sand.
The big question is will Prorata work? Will ad-funded generative AI answer engines even be a thing?
To answer these questions and more we spoke to Prorata chief business officer Annelies Jansen.
Today we also have an in-depth interview with the CEO of one of the UK's biggest magazine publishers, Immediate Media.
Given the magazine sector as a whole declined last year both in terms of circulation and advertising revenue, Cornwell has more reasons to be cheerful than his industry peers (and seemed so when I met him for lunch near the Hammersmith HQ of the Radio Times publisher).
Revenue is broadly flat year on year (at a not too shabby £182m for 2024). But profits are up thanks to growing revenue from digital subscriptions, podcasts and all-you-can-read magazine apps like Apple News and Readly.
He's the most enthusiastic publishing CEO I've yet met when it comes to AI, with staff adoption of the new technology a key target for the business.
Cornwell also gave me a new buzz term which, although a tad cringe, neatly sums up the content strategy of forward-looking consumer media brands. Immediate is now "platform agnostic" meaning it's all about producing content which meets the audience where they are (whether that’s print, a website, Youtube, a podcast or somewhere else).
And finally, Press Gazette is proud to announce the shortlist for this year's Future of Media Awards.
These finalists provide you with a guide to the best journalism-led digital products of the last year in the UK and around the world. We also highlight some of the best commercial strategies which are helping provide a profitable future for our noble trade.
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On Press Gazette
Podcasts, paywalls and Apple News fuel growing profitability at Immediate Media
“The lesson of the last 20 years is you’ve got to engage and lean in with this stuff and these challenges. You can’t sit on the side, moan and hope it goes away, because that’s the path of failure.”
Prorata: The generative AI player planning to share revenue with publishers
Prorata has new slogan: "They scrape and steal. We credit and compensate."
Future of Media Awards shortlist highlights best of digital journalism in 2025
Best podcasts, websites, newsletter and live journalism among awards categories.
Data and tech overhaul paved way for Prensa Iberica expansion (promoted)
Working with a content licensing agency gives publishers time back to focus on content creation while maximising revenue generation.
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Google Offerwall explained: Easy way for publishers to test pay-as-you-go and ad-gated access
How Google AI Overviews is fuelling zero-click searches for top publishers
Urgent bid lodged with UK regulator to stop Google AI Overviews ‘stealing journalism’
Latest podcast: On the front line of the reality wars with Rob Waugh
Fictional experts and non-existent experts are conning their way into UK news media with the help dodgy PR companies. It's a lucrative business proving search engine juice to gambling sites and dubious online retailers. And it won't stop until publishers raise their game in terms of verifying the sources they quote