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The top episodes and newsletters of 2025
We're rounding off the year bringing you our most listened-to and read pieces of the year.
Media Voices, Peter Houston & Esther Kezia Thorpe
December 16, 2025
Welcome to The Publisher Newsletter, by Media Voices: profiling the people and products powering publishing.
This is all from us for the year - we’ll be back in January with a special AI-themed season. Wishing you all a very Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!
The top MediaVoices episodes and newsletters of 2025
It’s been a jam packed year for the industry and for us. If you’re new here or have missed a couple of editions, here’s what our audience were listening to and reading the most in 2025.
Peter had a chat to Marissa Zanetti-Crume, Bloomberg Media’s Global Head of Product. Marissa talks about how her product team are collaborators, integrating content, technology, and commercial considerations.
We also spoke about Bloomberg Media’s newsletter strategy and how its 70-strong newsletter portfolio is a mix of subscriber exclusives and free newsletters positioned to deliver both revenue and reach. Marissa explains how the introduction of a live audio Q&A has given Bloomberg journalists the opportunity to engage directly with their audiences.
Peter’s interview with Katie Vanneck Smith, CEO at Hearst UK was unsurprisingly a hit - Katie is fantastic. Her career spans The Times, The Wall Street Journal and the Telegraph, as well as co-founding Tortoise. In the two years since joining Hearst, the company has launched and revamped membership programmes for Elle, Good Housekeeping, Men’s Health and Women’s Health, and soon Prima and Runner’s World.
Katie talks about subscriptions versus memberships, the importance of publishing teams, the future of print, and what the point is of industry associations as she takes up her role as chair of the PPA. She also dives into the formulas that make memberships successful.
We planned this report in response to a curious trend we saw popping up: print magazines are making headlines again – from mainstream news outlets to the specialised business press – long after their predicted demise. The report spotlights the trends driving the print resurgence, from collectibility to digital disillusionment, and lays out what the modern market for print magazines really looks like.
Print is not dead, and it isn’t just just surviving – it’s thriving, adapting to fit growing audience demand for premium products that deliver curated, collectible experiences in direct contrast to digital’s endless scroll.
Earlier in the year, Chris spoke to Tim Huelskamp, CEO and co-founder of 1440, a daily curated newsletter that now reaches over 4 million daily readers. He tells us about finding white space in the newsletter market, the forecast for newsletter advertising, whether the claim to be ‘unbiased’ is a selling point for audiences, and what it means to be an employee-owned media organisation.
Tim was involved in the private equity game for around a decade prior to founding 1440, spending time as co-founder of venture philanthropic funds and as an angel investor. In this episode Tim takes a very nuanced view – some might say pleasantly cynical at times – of the subject. He was very honest and forthright about when private equity works for the media, and why it often doesn’t.
Newsletters led by star writers and editors are proving an effective tool for publishers to supercharge loyalty, allowing them to build more personal relationships with readers and even improve conversions.
But putting key journalists front-and-centre is not without its risks, as the FT’s Sarah Ebner and The Economist’s Andrew Palmer and Dominic Rech discussed at the Publisher Newsletter Summit.
This episode, we hear from Alex White, Group Managing Director for Immediate Media’s Knowledge portfolio which includes BBC Gardeners’ World, BBC History and Immediate’s parenting business, MadeForMums.
We spoke about the benefits that come from the company’s focus on publishing verticals, how the magazine publisher is bringing a culture of innovation into the business by giving staff the space to innovate and how she believes encouraging an ‘entrepreneurial spirit’ is crucial to compete.
For publishers, the conversation around AI has moved on from how to incorporate it into the business. Now, ‘Fear of missing out’ has been replaced by ‘Fear of not being able to measure’.
“While the wow factor is there with Gen AI, the conversations are now, what is it exactly in the business that’s going to get boosted? Or what can I save, things that directly impact the business?” Bridged Media CEO Maanas Mediratta told us.
He joined the podcast to explore how publisher conversations around AI have moved on, and why measuring ROI is becoming a key part of the discourse.
For subscription-driven publishers, search and discovery changes present another challenge: a dwindling pipeline of potential subscribers. As it gets harder to fill the top of the funnel with easy search and social traffic, publishers either have to get better at converting the visitors they have, or rethink their growth strategies.
The Atlantic is not immune to these problems. We caught up with Megha Garibaldi, Chief Growth Officer at The Atlantic at FIPP Congress in Madrid after one of her stage sessions.
She spoke about the changes she’s seen in audiences’ willingness to pay over the years, the differences and similarities of working on membership and subscriber-driven publications, and where she’s looking for audience growth with the current headwinds.
The need to market newsletters was a common theme which came up across the Publisher Newsletter Summit. Two sessions in particular focused on strategies for newsletter marketing and discovery.
Sophie Laughton, Newsletter Editor at Metro.co.uk shared how a site redesign helped their newsletter team drive newsletter sign-ups, and how they approached prioritising newsletter marketing. Hannah Tomes, US Production Editor at The Spectator also took to the stage to discuss which marketing and growth strategies have and haven’t worked for their own newsletter portfolio.
Like The Wind (LTW) is a running magazine launched in 2014, a ‘collectible’ inspired by high-spec publications like Rouleur, The Ride Journal and Monocle. At the time, Publisher Simon Freeman and his wife Julie saw that there wasn’t an equivalent in the running space and set out to fill the gap.
Beginning as a side hustle, the magazine is now on a path to growth, making the most of parallel changes in the running industry and the market for independent magazines. Both are ‘having a moment’ Simon told me on The Publisher Podcast, explaining how the addressable market for a coffee-table-style running magazine has exploded.
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