The Publisher Podcast by Media Voices

Welcome back to the latest season of The Publisher Podcast, bringing you the best of the main stage sessions from The Publisher Summit. This week's guest is Liz Settle, MD of Good Housekeeping. Liz joined Good Housekeeping in 2023 with a ‘change brief’ to ready Good Housekeeping for the future. Over the past few years, she’s bridged the gap between customer needs and editorial output, broken down print and digital silos, built intergenerational readership, and innovated across the print product. In this interview recorded live on stage at The Publisher Summit, she talks about how these changes helped grow audience and revenue, and why she’s optimistic about the future of publishing. Thanks to the Summit's premium sponsors; Pugpig and Beehiiv, and to the digital sponsors; qwoted, Adestra, Woodwing and Warners for their support.

Welcome back to the latest season of The Publisher Podcast, bringing you the best of the main stage sessions from The Publisher Summit. This week's guest is Sarah Donaldson, co-founder of news start-up The Nerve. In a bit of a twist, this isn’t actually audio from the Summit. We scheduled a 20 minute interview slot on stage with Sarah and barely scratched the surface of what we wanted to discuss as it’s such a fascinating case study, so we caught up with her again over the summer as The Nerve nears its first birthday for an extended interview. The Nerve was launched last September by a group of five former Observer journalists. In less than a week after launching, it had hit 8,000 sign-ups and more than 1,000 paying members, all without a paywall. As they turn one, they’ve continued to go from strength to strength, and significantly are now on the brink of sustainability. Sarah talks about the opportunity they spotted to launch a news and culture brand, which audience touchpoints they decided to focus on, and why they’ve seen such early success. Thanks to the Summit's premium sponsors; Pugpig and Beehiiv, and to the digital sponsors; qwoted, Adestra, Woodwing and Warners for their support.

For publishers and event organisers, knowing where to start with AI is a common conundrum. For Bridged Media’s clients, the starting point is always a problem to be solved. Welcome to the latest in our Media Briefs series of short, sharp sponsored episodes, this time featuring a senior executive working with a vendor that is making their businesses better. In this episode, we hear from Sharon Roessen, Chief Operating Officer at global B2B events business Terrapinn, working with Bridged Media to develop a series of AI agents designed to streamline customer experience. She spoke about the development process - from identifying a problem to developing a solution - and how one agentic AI experiment has led to a suite of agents that are increasing event attendance and easing registration bottlenecks. This Media Briefs episode is sponsored by Bridged Media, democratising AI for publishers. Through no-code AI solutions, Bridged lets publishers access the power of machine learning and Gen AI to meet their engagement and revenue objectives. Learn more about Bridged Media’s no-code AI tools on their website.

In this special Conversations episode of The Publisher Podcast, sponsored by Pugpig, we hear from CEO and founder Jonny Kaldor about the data that proves apps are engagement and retention powerhouses. Pugpig has just released their annual 2026 Media App Report, packed with benchmarks and insights from 140 media brands and 440+ live apps. Jonny looks at some of the publisher app trends from the report, why direct consumer relationships are the highest priority right now, and the deeper levels of engagement shown by app users compared to web visitors. He also explains why apps are now surprisingly being used for subscriber acquisition, not just retention, and how publishers can identify gaps in their conversion strategies using apps.

In the final episode of this season of The Publisher Podcast, we're joined by Lily Barclay, the first Content Director of Immediate's Food Group covering BBC Good Food and olive magazine. Lily has been with Good Food for over 18 years and has seen the brand's evolution from print only to a multiplatform and multi-brand specialist publishing group. She talks about what separates their food brands, Immediate's new Good Food Kitchen to support digital content creation and real-world recipe testing, and leveraging ratings and reviews to build trust. She also takes us inside olive's successful print refresh, where a reduced frequency, higher quality stock and price point has rewarded them with a 40% increase in newsstand sales and 400% increase in subscriptions. Read the key takeaways from this interview, find our weekly newsletter and more on voices.media