RELX saw record £9.4bn revenue in 2024 | Notts TV to close
Plus we have the national newspaper ABC figures for January
Good morning and welcome to your daily Press Gazette media briefing on Tuesday 18 February.
Face-to-face events and online subscriptions helped fuel the UK's largest media company to record turnover last year.
Exhibitions were its fastest-growing sector in terms of profitability. And it is worth taking note of the way it uses AI. It has its own generative AI assistant used to analyse its vast lake of legal information. It also provides its legal users with an AI-drafting tool which writes legal documents for them.
Using AI to provide readers with services that save them time and money could be a way to leverage two key assets of great newsbrands: trust and reliable information.
Today we also have the latest UK national newspaper ABC figures, which show the worst-performing titles (the Reach-owned Sunday People and Daily Star Sunday) falling at more than 20% year on year.
The Sun, Times, Guardian and Telegraph no longer share their circulation figures but I have had a stab at estimating where they are now based on market trends. Any circulation managers reading please feel free to contact me in confidence if my guesstimates are wrong!
And we report on the demise of another local TV channel - Notts TV. This follows London Live closing last month after ten years on air, with Local TV Ltd taking over the slot.
On Press Gazette
AI and events help power RELX to record £9.4bn revenue
In October 2023 RELX launched Lexis+ AI, its own generative AI solution designed to provide “hallucination-free” answers grounded in “the world’s largest repository of accurate and exclusive legal content”.
Notts TV to close in November when licence ends
Nottingham Trent University, which owns and subsidises Notts TV, has decided that running the channel no longer benefits its students enough to warrant the investment.
Newspaper ABCs: Daily Mail defies trend of monthly print circulation decline
The Daily Mail’s print circulation has increased month on month for the second month in a row.
News in brief
The Washington Post has declined to run an $115,000 ad for a "Fire Elon Musk" campaign that would have covered the front and back page of Tuesday's paper, according to The Hill. The paper told the campaign group they could only run the ad on inside pages. (The Hill)
The BBC added information into an article about food insecurity in Gaza to counter an "impression that the prospect of famine was merely an incidental consequence of the conflict". But the BBC complaints unit said the change should have been acknowledged. (BBC)
Palestine Action claimed responsibility for glass doors smashed and red paint sprayed on BBC Broadcasting House in London yesterday. The campaigners said: "The BBC’s biased reporting isn’t a simple case of poor journalism – it’s a matter of life and death.” (The Independent)
Also on Press Gazette:
Reach told by ASA to stop posting ad features on social media without flagging
New London newspaper launches with promise to revitalise Fleet Street
Who’s suing AI and who’s signing: 14 publishers join lawsuit against start-up Cohere
National World shareholders approve acquisition by Media Concierge
Two Birmingham Live headlines ‘actively misleading’ says IPSO
Giving readers less can lead to more subscribers, new research
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Over four years at the Financial Times head of newsletters for the title Sarah Ebner has helped grow the title's number of email subscribers from 500,000 to 1.6 million. She told Press Gazette that email newsletters are now the biggest driver of reader engagement at the FT. They are also hugely important for subscriber loyalty and finding new paying readers as well as providing advertising and subscription revenue in their own right.