Newsquest CEO on company's local revenue resilience | How to do news on Snapchat
You can listen to Newsquest's Henry Faure Walker's remarks in full on our latest podcast
Good morning and welcome to your weekly Future of Media newsletter from Press Gazette on Thursday, 16 November, brought to you this week by EX․CO - the world's leading publisher video platform, empowering publishers to own their video strategy for maximum yield. Their latest blog post, "Why 100% Video Coverage is a Game Changer for Publishers," is available now.
Today we have a rare interview with Newsquest chief executive Henry Faure Walker at a tough time for many in the regional news industry.
Faure Walker was speaking at our Future of Media Trends event last week just a day after major cuts were announced at Reach – but he didn’t want to trash talk his major competitor.
Instead he gave insights into what is currently working at Newsquest – including staying local where possible, growing online subscriptions to be a small but useful part of the revenue mix, and experimenting with AI to free up journalists to do what they do best.
Of course, one of the challenges faced by Reach and many other publishers is social media platforms’ ever-increasing reluctance to send people away from their sites and to news websites, making it harder to monetise the attention their brands get.
But Snapchat isn’t giving up on news yet and head of UK partnerships Lucy Luke told Bron Maher that they recognise having trusted news sources on the platform is important to users.
Luke shared information about the different opportunities for publishers on Snapchat and tips about what works and who’s doing well.
Snapchat might not be the biggest social media platform for news (this year’s Reuters Institute Digital News Report found that 2% of people used Snapchat for news compared to the 28% of people who used Facebook) but it’s outsized in its potential value for publishers and worth looking at.
New from Press Gazette
Newsquest CEO Henry Faure Walker on bucking the trend of regional press decline
“About 35% of our revenue comes from local direct advertisers, so we’re not we’re always exposed to the programmatic market, or indeed the national market, and that’s been generally positive for us.”
Platform profile: How to reach the 70 million people using Snapchat for news
The 50/50 advertising revenue split Snapchat offers its partner publishers has made it a worthwhile investment for some news outlets.
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Our latest podcast
Podcast 60: How to make local news pay with Newsquest CEO Henry Faure Walker
Last year UK regional news giant Newsquest made £40m in pre-tax profits on turnover of £190m.
This year it is tracking to have ad revenue broadly flat over two years.
CEO Henry Faure Walker spoke to Dominic Ponsford about how the publisher of 200+ titles is bucking the trend on both audience and advertising revenue decline. He also shed light on some fascinating experiments using generative AI in the newsroom.
Must-reads this week from Press Gazette you might have missed
Telegraph journalists told use of ChatGPT will result in same sanctions as plagiarism
Google and Meta could owe US news publishers $14bn a year under planned law, research estimates
Network of PR-led UK local news websites used to promote paid-for content
Revealed: UK newsbrands with most Editors’ Code breaches in 2022
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