Q: What is your print strategy?
A: This is slightly difficult to answer given the title is a ‘Celebration of Print’ and we have always been open about viewing our future as being a digital publisher.
What I would say is we recognise we are custodians of some incredible brands and we need to be incredibly careful with them.
Some of our titles — the Kentish Gazette in Canterbury, the Stamford Mercury in Lincolnshire — have been printed since the 1700s. Whether they will still exist in print long into the future is debatable, but the mastheads will always survive and it is our duty they remain central to people’s lives whatever the format.
We see print as something we need to preserve for as long as there remains a demand from readers, and I think in many cases that will be for a long while yet. The same applies to our advertisers — we know people aren’t realistically going to use our newspapers as their first port of call when searching for a new house but for many estate agents, the brand awareness and prestige associated with being in print is really important.
We will continue to focus our attention on those brands which we feel have the greatest longevity and the biggest connection to the communities.
And we want to make sure that if people are considering giving up print as their habits have changed then we retain them as a paying customer, either reading digital editions of our titles or subscribing to our premium websites.
Q: How are you ensuring print’s longevity?
A: We have changed the structure of our newsrooms so, as far as possible, we can precisely identify how much resource is specifically dedicated to print.
Reporters are obviously platform agnostic and we need their stories whether it’s for print or online, but we want to minimise production costs wherever we can.
That’s not because we don’t value print — just the opposite. It’s so we have a really clear understanding of the P&L for each title.
The production workflows have been greatly simplified over the years. As with most publishers, we are very template-driven. It’s very likely there will be further technological advances which simplify this production process even further.
The further we can go in reducing these production costs, the greater the longevity for many of our titles.
Q: What are your three top tips?
1. Be bold with cover prices. Looking back over the years, we spent an awful lot of time debating whether we should increase prices by 5p or 10p when we probably could have gone further. I am not a fan of the clichéd comparisons with the price of a coffee, but the fact is newsprint is expensive, distribution is expensive and we shouldn’t be afraid to treat it as a premium product. And whilst we are always upfront with readers, it’s also true that a largely cashless society means people are less likely to notice whether they are getting 5p or 10p change.
2. Structure your newsrooms so you have a really clear understanding of how profitable — or otherwise — your newspapers really are. It can be hard to unpick those costs when our reporters work across multiple platforms but it’s essential for understanding which titles are the ones you want to focus your attention on.
3. Don’t try to do everything — it’s better to produce fewer titles to a higher standard than continue putting effort into those which don’t have a long future. That’s not an admission of defeat, it’s simply an acknowledgement that we have some incredible brands with centuries of history and others that may not have such a rich history.
This article was included in the 'Celebration of Print' special, published by InPublishing in August 2025. Click here to see the other articles in this special feature.
