When the judges of the 2024 PPA Awards named Esther Newman Editor of the Year, they praised the editor of Women’s Running magazine and host of the popular podcast of the same name, for displaying exceptional editorial authority while delivering on commercial aims. They also commended her ability, “to foster a culture of inclusivity through an authentic and compassionate approach to journalism”. It is all the more impressive that Newman managed to achieve this while working mainly from her kitchen table with a core team of one and a half people.
When I speak to her, Newman modestly insists the award should be as much for her team as for her. While there are more people working in the wider team, many of these roles are spread across several brands at Bath-based Anthem Publishing including marketing and commercial. Digital editor and podcast co-host Holly Taylor is also mainly focused on Women’s Running, but if you are talking purely about the print and editorial side of things, there is just Newman full time and art editor Alex Duce two weeks out of four. Such is the reality of specialist magazine journalism today.
Newman says: “Editing a magazine is a very different beast to what it was twenty years ago. Our teams are tiny and disparate and we’re all working from home. When I first started working at Future, there were nine of us on a team. Now there’s 1.5. That doesn’t really explain how collaborative the process of getting a magazine and podcast out is.”
Everyone has a say
The benefit of this collaborative approach is that everyone’s ideas are taken on board. “Our most successful issues have been because of a team process of someone saying, ‘Wouldn’t it be good if we had this person on the cover?’ and someone else saying, ‘Don’t they normally run in Nike, why don’t we talk with them?’ and someone else saying, ‘Aren’t they also running this race?’”
Since Covid shook up the traditional workplace, the team at Anthem has been “a little bit nomadic” and even pre-pandemic, Newman often worked from home because of family commitments. In 2025, that is about to change however, with “a spangly new office in a very bouji part of Bath”. The expectation is that everyone will go into the office at least a couple of times a month, but Newman suspects it might be more like once or twice a week thanks to “a plethora of coffee shops” nearby.
She is looking forward to being back in the office more often because of the meetings and connections this will bring about. “It’s very difficult to come up with ideas if you’re just sat at home in your kitchen.” While Newman is herself a keen runner who lives and breathes her brand, it can help to bounce ideas off other team members who are not as embedded in the running community as she is. “If I say, ‘We really need to do an issue on marathons’, it’s great to be sat with someone who’ll say, ‘But does everyone run marathons?’,” she explains.
Her mission is to enable her audience to lead healthier, happier lives. Women’s Running encourages a balanced and holistic approach to health, eschewing diet culture. This is a philosophy shared throughout Anthem, which also publishes Vegan Food & Living. Recently the company has embraced one-shot bookazines. It began with titles inspired by the company’s music brands, including one-shots to coincide with Taylor Swift’s UK tour and has evolved into a series of healthy eating guides. Alongside her day job, Newman has recently been working on a bookazine called 30 Days to Better Gut Health.
She says: “We have so much stuff about nutrition and health in Women’s Running that it was a natural fit for me to do this bookazine. That’s an area that we’re all really excited about, because those perfect bound coffee table magazines, they’re thicker, they’re glossy and they tend to have things like recipes in them so it’s something you would hang on to for a while. We’re hoping to expand and come up with some more ideas there in the future.”
Running with friends
The typical Women’s Running reader is aged between 30 and 60 — although Newman is quick to point out there are also plenty of readers in their 20s as well as in their 70s and even 80s. She loves running with friends and a 10K race is her sweet spot, although she also likes working towards a half marathon as a big goal. If she has children, they are probably grown up, or at least old enough to fend for themselves while she pops on her trainers and heads off for a run. Women’s Running fulfils the role of a running group, a regular meet up with like-minded folk. This is especially the case with the magazine’s Discord community where women will come on to show off their medals, big up others and discuss their successes and injuries. “They are inclusive, friendly, charming, they’re like a jazzy pair of leggings and they like a bit of mud,” says Newman.
Half marathons for these women often take on the role of a girls’ weekend. “These half marathons are in such good cities; yes, you could choose Bath or Cardiff or London, but you could also choose Seville or Lisbon or Dublin. More and more, we see women are choosing these half marathons as a bit of a mini break. You train for a third of the year for that half marathon, but you also combine it with the fun times.”
While the magazine sells between 6-8,000 copies a month, the podcast has around 40,000-60,000 monthly listeners. Originally launched to help sell copies of the magazine, the podcast rapidly took on a life of its own. Listeners are very engaged, often tuning in for more than 80% of the podcast before turning off. What they didn’t quite appreciate when they started it was how much of a captive audience they had.
“It was a brilliant idea in hindsight. When you go for a run, you want something to take your mind off the fact that running is quite hard, so you need to have something in your ears if you’re not really a music listener,” says Newman.
Such is the intimacy of podcasting that when she is out and about at running events, women wearing their ‘Pod Squad’ T-shirts will often come up to her and chat to her as if she is an old friend.
“The difference is on the podcast, we do feel like we can be way more authentic than we are in the magazine. In the magazine we have to be more educational, whereas with the podcast we can be more irreverent. There’s loads more swearing, there’s loads more chatting about stuff that isn’t necessarily about running,” she adds.
Going on tour
Live events are the lifeblood of the running industry, and this is an area that Newman is keen to expand on. A couple of years ago, they partnered with a company called Sports Tours International to arrange a half marathon weekend in Paris where they did a live podcast recording at their hotel in front of a small select audience. “Terrible recording quality aside, it was an absolutely joyous experience and enabled us to realise that there was an appetite for meeting in person.”
Newman and Taylor have also spoken live at the National Running Show for the past few years, chairing panel discussions on women’s running and related health issues, with a focus on the menopause, which are always very well attended. They also do a monthly live Zoom podcast just for their Patreon members. “I’d love to take the podcast on tour because we know that our audience are nationwide. That would be my dream,” says Newman.
As a small team, it can be difficult to attend all the events they are invited to, and the magazine relies heavily on freelancers to run races and report back. Relationship building is at the heart of the brand.
“People in the running industry mostly are lovely people because they run, so endorphins are high, there is a lot of happiness and cheerfulness going round, but there are a lot of brands also, so we always have to sell our USP, which is women,” Newman explains.
Fostering inclusivity
Post-covid, lots of brands have shifted their focus away from marathons and ultra-marathons towards grassroots clubs for beginner to medium runners. Women’s Running is also very much part of the conversation around inclusivity and how they can help women of all ages and backgrounds to access running.
“We can’t run every marathon, but nor can these women and the reason they can’t is because they’re too expensive, they’re in the middle of nowhere, they can’t get any childcare,” says Newman.
She adds: “It’s so easy for brands to say, ‘running’s easy, you just have to put one foot in front of the other’. No, it bloody isn’t. It is fundamentally a hard thing to do, but it’s even harder if you can’t see yourself represented out there or you feel the streets outside your front door are unsafe, or you’re a single parent. There are all these massive barriers and that’s without men who shout horrible things at women, so I feel like we offer something much more in depth than other health brands when it comes to that sort of stuff.”
She firmly believes it is crucial for magazine editors to be respectful of their audience, not just because they are parting with £5.99 a month, but because their opinions matter. That is why she sees meeting readers and listeners at events as one of the most important parts of her job.
“It’s only from those conversations that I feel I know who she is and understand what she wants. I don’t have to run marathons to do that, but it helps.”
This article was first published in InPublishing magazine. If you would like to be added to the free mailing list to receive the magazine, please register here.
