Morning! Today's Media Roundup is by Esther.

Subscriptions are up for Dennis Magazine Titles — freeportpress.com

Some good news to start the morning. Since the beginning of lockdown, the number of people subscribing to all Dennis titles has increased by 9%, according to the publisher. To counter postal challenges, all their titles have offered free digital access to subscribers throughout the pandemic - an effort which has been "met with glowing reviews by readers."

But they didn't just focus on delivery, the various teams also implemented engagement campaigns to get new subscribers. It's probably unsurprising that The Week Junior has seen a surge. Parents looking for new ways to entertain their children in lockdown have driven circulation up 23% since March, and their accompanying app was downloaded over 20,000 times in the first month alone.

More surprising is the success of titles like Cyclist, which have seen subscriptions rise by 39% since January as people focused on exercise during quarantine, and as an alternative to public transport as restrictions have lifted.

Disclosure: I worked for Dennis for 3 years between 2017-2020

Why no one knows which stories are the most popular on Facebook — www.theverge.com

If you're interested in the inner workings of Facebook's algorithms when it comes to publisher's posts, this is a fascinating read. It looks like Facebook’s CrowdTangle is only telling part of the story about what is truly popular — and viral tweets about it are driving the company crazy.

Publishers can now determine exactly how much traffic is generated from Google’s News tab — whatsnewinpublishing.com

One from the other tech giant; Google has announced that publishers will now have the ability to filter and analyse traffic coming in from the News tab in search results (no, you couldn't do this before!) How you actually get a story into News is still a mystery, but the more data available on traffic sources, the better.

Why we should mourn the loss of Q magazine — www.newstatesman.com

An excellent obituary of Q magazine from David Hepworth, one of the original founders. "To the editorial team I would say this: it's not your "fault". You're not a genius when the market's running for you and you're not a failure when it's going the other way."

Throwback Thursday:

Editor in Chief of The Week Junior US Andrea Barbalich and Chief Executive of The Week Kerin O'Connor on launching a print title for kids — voices.media

Given Dennis' subscription success, this seemed like an appropriate throwback. This was recorded in January, and little did Andrea and Kerin know what was about to hit their March launch. If you want to know how they dealt with it, I did a write-up from a webinar with UK editor Anna Bassi for WNIP back in June.

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