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Pod in a Pub: Publishing’s pivotal moments this year, and predictions for 2025

This episode of The Publisher Podcast by Media Voices – our last for this season – was recorded at the White Swan in Aldgate, London on November 27th in front of a live audience.

In the absence of our usual annual Media Moments report*, we took a fun look back at some of the pivotal publishing moments of the year, and what 2025 might have in store. The audience were invited to participate so we’re able to include contributions from wiser folks than us!

The team’s top stories from 2024

Chris: The Onion announcing it had bought Infowars after Alex Jones’ bankruptcy

This recent story has since become a little more complicated, and a judge in Texas is currently deciding whether The Onion put forward a valid bid. The Onion therefore joins Cards Against Humanity – which just sued SpaceX and Musk for dumping trash on its property – in being purveyors of jokes that are better at holding the powerful to account than most legacy media outlets. And if that assertion makes you angry, good. You should be angry.

It comes down to this: very many legacy outlets are incumbents, comfortable in their positions. They challenge passively, when they challenge at all. Look at the NYT’s coverage of the U.S. election, for instance, which hedged criticism and made dogma of both-sidesism. And I think that’s in no small part responsible for the historic lows in trust in those incumbents. For the third consecutive year, more U.S. adults have no trust at all in the media (36%) than trust it a great deal or fair amount. Another 33% of Americans express “not very much” confidence, according to Gallup.

When The New European launched Matt Kelly said it had to be in print because it was effectively a flag to wave (fun fact, The Onion is also in print!). The antidote to this trust crisis is anger – transparent, subjective, and driven by new publications.

Esther: Google WTF

There have been a slew of stories about Google this year which just a short time ago would have been inconceivable. In July, Google abandoned a plan it announced 4 years ago and has delayed and delayed since then to block third-party cookies from Chrome. It’s continuing to pursue many of the alternatives it’s been developing in its Privacy Sandbox, some of which have had more success than others, but won’t be turning third-party cookies off.

On the plus side, because we were months out from the switch-off, it has been successful in pushing the industry to rely less on third-party cookies. But this does mean the bottom-feeders will continue to…well…bottom feed.

That’s not all. The company is coming under immense pressure and potentially facing break-up. The US Department of Justice and Google are wrapping up the Google adtech antitrust trial as we recorded. But a number of aspects have already not gone Google’s way; over the summer, a federal judge ruled that Google illegally maintains its monopoly in search and search advertising. The government are now proposing Google divest Chrome.

It’s also been notable this year that Google has struggled to control the AI slop, along with botching the rollout of AI overviews (glue on pizza, anyone?). There’s no question Chrome is still the dominant search engine by a country mile, but it’s fast becoming a very dissatisfying search experience. The power Google has held for almost 20 years is visibly eroding, and that’ll have implications – some good, some bad – for all of us.

Peter: Corporate Rock Sucks

We weren’t enthused about Condé Nast’s decision to fold iconic music-review website Pitchfork into men’s lifestyle magazine GQ at the beginning of the year. The announcement brought howls of protest from music fans, many viewing the merger as the first nail in Pitchfork’s coffin. Others saw the move inside a men’s title as further proof that, when it comes to music, women don’t matter.

Rather than going deep with specialist titles, this shows how much Condé are relying on the ‘mushy middle‘ of publishing strategies; an interesting contrast with Dow Jones’ vertical approach, as they recently explained to us.

But it’s not all bad news. Five former Pitchfork journalists are getting the band together to start a new online music publication, Hearing Things. Peter’s takeaway from the year is that personality is king, there are riches in niches, and greater loyalty comes from smaller audiences.

Predictions for 2025

The print revival comes to news

Esther is hopeful that next year will see a revival of news print. Not newspapers, but news print; weekly or monthly magazine-style editions. Newspapers are clearly in a long-term decline that is unlikely to reverse. But a look at what’s happening with the magazine print revival shows that there is hope for the format, albeit different to what it was a few decades ago.

There’s an opportunity here with news print because the need is very strong, and is a good solution to news avoidance: something perhaps weekly, digestible, so readers can be informed without being stressed out by a firehose of news from their phones.

It’s a good time for publications like The Week and The Economist…but print needs to be the hero product here, not tucked away at the back of subscription package offers.

Caution on over-diversification

At the PPA’s Independent Publisher Conference, Sift’s Chief Strategy Officer Louise White pointed out that the industry has got too absorbed with multiple revenue streams. “The obsession with diversifying revenues is dangerous,” she said on Linkedin. “That’s a bigger media play. Most independents don’t have the expertise or bandwidth and it leads to mediocrity at many rather than excellence in few.”

She’s not the only industry expert to have made this point recently. Simon Owens answered a reader question in a recent post and noted that “there’s more value in doing one thing really well than putting out multiple half-assed products. That’s not to say you should never diversify — just that you should focus on building one solid business before branching out into new areas.”

However, research from FT Strategies demonstrated that there is still clear benefit from having multiple revenue streams. News organisations with three or four primary revenue streams (of 20% or more) are more profitable and more sustainable than those with just one or two.

So Peter thinks the ‘mix of six’ saying we’ve been fans of for years should perhaps be revised for 2025. The key is…three?

Studies have found that few publishers convert more than 10% of their audience to paying subscribers. But mitigating churn and fostering retention is challenging in today’s landscape. So what are media and publishing companies to do?

Find out what the leading causes of subscriber churn are, why first-party data is the key to growth and profitability, and what strategies you can employ to retain subscribers and reduce churn in BlueConic’s free resource, A Publisher’s Guide to Mitigating Churn and Increasing Subscriber Retention.

More good reads from the week: