Music magazine Q has abruptly closed five-and-a-half months after being revived online.

A team of six full-time journalists in the US and UK were told on Monday they were losing their jobs as a result.

Two days later, in a separate magazine relaunch, a new digital version of lads’ mag Loaded went live.

Q magazine originally closed after 34 years in July 2020 after it was badly hit by the Covid-19 pandemic and owner Bauer Media Group failed to find a buyer.

Last year the privately-owned New York-based Empire Media Group, which is led by former National Enquirer editor-in-chief Dylan Howard as chief executive, struck a licensing deal with Bauer to relaunch Q. Empire has acquired and relaunched other magazine brands internationally including the website for the American version of OK! magazine.

Empire Media Group’s website says it is a “next-generation publishing media house with a large and diversified portfolio of brands supported by superior monetization and diverse revenue streams”.

Q magazine closure ‘a bloody crying shame’

However, its Q magazine venture has now closed less than six months after its relaunch, having first appointed staff in August.

UK editor Dominic Utton wrote on X that the team had taken the qthemusic.com website from zero in December to 1.5 million monthly page views and 926,000 unique visitors.

Utton wrote: “It’s all a bloody crying shame, but that’s the media landscape right now I guess… In an age when outlets for quality music journalism are increasingly scarce, this is just more bad news for an industry in danger of going under completely.”

Editor-in-chief Andrew Barker, a former music editor and senior features writer for Variety based in the US, wrote on Linkedin: “As is increasingly the case in this business, the decision to pull the plug came with no advance warning, and no indication that anything was wrong.

“To say that we were shocked and devastated would be a colossal understatement. For one, we had a hell of a week planned: multiple interviews, two very fun lists, a cover story, and one piece that we were pretty sure was going to make some serious noise. (And man, you should have seen the plans we had for this summer…) We had really found our stride in recent months, posting our best traffic yet.

“But most importantly, all six of us put our hearts and souls into this venture, logging countless late nights and weekends, because we believed in what we were doing, and wanted to prove that there was still a place for dedicated, thoughtful, outrageously nerdy music writing in 2024.”

The team was completed by news editor and former US Sun reporter Noah Zucker, senior editors/writers Will Harris and Amy Hughes and writer Peter Helman, a former editor at Stereogum who also recently wrote for The Messenger which folded in January.

Harris noted on his Substack that the closure was a “business decision” but the team worked long hours “because we all loved what we were doing, and we all want to make it the best possible publication we could”.

Their interviewees included the likes of Liam Gallagher, The Libertines, Sheryl Crow, Joan Jett, the Jesus and Mary Chain and Billy Idol.

Chris Duncan, Bauer’s chief executive of UK publishing, said in January: “We are pleased to work with EMG to support the relaunch of a much-loved brand, Q. The agreement supports EMG’s desire to maintain Q’s legacy ensuring that music lovers worldwide will have another title to enjoy that complements our own portfolio of specialist brands.”

Press Gazette has contacted Empire Media Group for comment.

Loaded relaunch

Meanwhile on Wednesday Loaded, which defined the lads’ mag era of the 90s and noughties, was relaunched as a website nine years after closing down.

The print magazine’s circulation had declined from 350,000 in 2000 to 34,360 at the end of 2014.

The new Loaded has subtly tweaked the original magazine’s tagline from “for men who should know better” to “for men who know better”.

It has a membership scheme costing £9 per month or £96 per year (after a three-month trial).

Members get a copy of a special 30th anniversary print magazine with Liz Hurley back on the cover, unlimited access to the website, access to the archive, event invites and other member-only perks. It claimed members will save more than £800 per year on average through exclusive discounts.

The relaunch is being led by Danni Levy as executive editor, who left her role as editor-in-chief at Muscle and Health to do so. She is also a former editor-in-chief of Muscle & Fitness UK and is a fitness expert who has appeared on programmes like ITV’s This Morning.

A press release said Loaded was “building a space for straight talk, epic experiences, and a community that celebrates who men really are” and promised “absolute finest in music, sports, film and all else that sparks your mojo”.

Press Gazette has contacted the new Loaded for more details about who is behind the relaunch.

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Google’s incoming AI-generated search results have been described in Press Gazette as a “potential extinction-level event”.

But at the PPA Festival in London on Tuesday, Bauer Media Group’s global head of SEO Stuart Forrest shared a potential alternative view – suggesting publishers that double down on quality could see some advantages from it.

Google SGE (search generative experience) began rolling out in the US last year and its UK trial started this month.

Publishers are concerned about its arrival because it answers queries at the top of the search results page that otherwise may have resulted in clickthroughs to publisher websites – thus posing a risk to search referrals, especially to publishers with a smaller proportion of direct traffic.

Google’s AI-generated results may even have been trained on that publisher’s content without any payment exchange taking place.

Forrest acknowledged the potential severity of the arrival of SGE, saying that although publishers don’t build business models on answering questions like “how tall is Tom Cruise?” for which Google already provides a quick answer, they do monetise the answers to more nuanced queries like “what is the best laptop for me to buy for my gaming child under £1,000?”

“And SGE threatens our business model to an extent because it’s starting to answer some of those questions. So it’s breaking the referral model that sees traffic coming back to our sites to be monetised.”

He later added: “The top three results in search deliver 60% of all clicks, so anything which appears above them threatens that… that’s a substantial impact on the business.”

AI search could threaten Google’s own ad business – and it’s expensive

But in an attempt to give some “reasons to be cheerful”, he shared some lessons from watching the early trials of SGE.

“One is, like a lot of LLMs, it’s hallucinatory, right? So Google is actually being quite measured in how it delivers that. It’s absolutely not delivering it at all against some classes of content like medical advice.

“It’s absolutely staying clear of some very contentious issues like the gun debate in the US or the US election. I would not want SGE to be telling me whether my child’s rash might be meningitis, and actually I think Google probably wouldn’t…”

Forrest went on: “The second thing is that it’s expensive, right? It’s cheaper for Google to deliver a blue link to a publisher in the SERP [search engine results page], whereas SGE requires processing power… So I don’t think Google will do that if it knows that it’s more expensive than the same result, which delivers the same results to users in a cheaper way.

“And I think the third point is that Google is obviously an advertising business. And the advertising model for SGE is not clear. SGE threatens the click rate of our content, but it also threatens Google’s core advertising business.

“So my slightly more positive view would be that Google faces competition from LLMs as the place where you go online to find information, the place where you go to find answers. And in a lot of Google’s language in the last six to 12 months, they are having a flight to quality, and they are doubling down on quality.”

Forrest referred to Google’s emphasis on what it dubs EEAT: experience, expertise, authority, and trustworthiness. It has particularly emphasised these qualities since December 2022.

“We are all as publishers having to double down on the explicit signals we send to Google about the quality of our content, the quality of the people who write it, and trust in our brands,” Forrest added.

“And so actually, my contention might be that we’re coming into the era where high-quality brands of the type that I see represented around this room could potentially do very well in a world where Google is doubling down on quality.”

The PPA Festival is attended by magazine and specialist publishers like Immediate Media (which publishes the Radio Times), Conde Nast (Vogue), Mark Allen Group (Farmers Weekly), Hearst (Good Housekeeping) and Haymarket (Campaign) as well as Forrest’s employer Bauer (Empire) and former employer Future (Tom’s Guide).

Google argues that SGE will continue to “send valuable traffic to the ecosystem, including by surfacing more links. This includes surfacing links to a wider range of sources on the results page and giving even more opportunities for content to be discovered.”

However, media consultant Ricky Sutton, who writes the Future Media newsletter and is a former head of online at the News of the World, gave the room a more pessimistic view and argued publishers need to have a plan B.

Sutton said: “I’m a strong believer that this is the start of a fundamental change in search, what I call no-click search, which means that your results disappear from the first page of search, which I think is cataclysmic, potentially, for our industry.”

He added: “I think that we have to prepare for this because in all honesty, SGE is actually a really good product if you’re a consumer. It gives you an answer instantly. It’s great. It’s just disastrous for us that create the content.”

Hear more from Sutton about life after Google on our recent Future of Media Explained podcast.

The post Why AI-powered search from Google may NOT be disaster for publishers appeared first on Press Gazette.

Three-quarters of the UK’s biggest media organisations increased the percentage of women in their top teams in the past year.

Of 34 media organisations big enough to be required to report gender pay data to the Government, 26 (or 76%) increased the proportion of women in their top pay quarter between 2022 and 2023.

As of the latest snapshot date of 5 April 2023, there were more men than women within the top 25% paid employees at 79% of the companies in our analysis. This is down from 91% a year earlier.

Bloomberg (21.7% women), Sun publisher News Group Newspapers (27.5%) and Mirror Group Newspapers (28%) are at the bottom of the table for percentage of women in their top pay band.

It should be noted that the figures cover whole companies, which for some such as Bloomberg and Sky UK will mean a majority of roles are not journalism related.

Two publishers have 50/50 balance in their top teams: Scottish broadcaster STV Television and Newsquest Community Media, the arm of Newsquest that used to be Archant before its 2022 acquisition.

Five publishers have a majority of women in their top quartiles, led by Hearst on 66% and followed by Conde Nast on 58.9% and Haymarket on 53%.

Which? saw the biggest jump, from 27% representation in 2022 to 51% last year. William Reed was up from 39% to 47% while The Independent went from 33.33% to 39.1%.

Despite most having fewer women than men in their top pay quarter, 82% have more women than men in their lowest-paid group.

The exceptions are Which? (24% women in bottom quarter), Newsquest (28%), Press Association (35.8%), Sky UK (46%), Mirror Group Newspapers (48%) and Bloomberg (49%).

This imbalance suggests more women's careers stall after they have children, or there are other reasons they miss out on promotions.

Average UK media gender pay gap now 11%

This is likely to play a large part in the gender pay gap of the industry, which is now at 11% across the 34 publishers ranked by their data for 5 April 2023.

This means that women are on average paid 11% less than men.

This is a marginal improvement from last year when the average was 12%.

The gender pay gap is not about equal pay and whether men and women are paid the same to do the same jobs, but rather can indicate men dominating in higher-paid roles.

Note: Figures for GB News in 2022 are included in our charts but not in our analysis - the broadcaster was late reporting its figures last year so got missed out of our last set of charts, and it has missed the deadline again this year.

The biggest median gender pay gaps are at Bloomberg (23%) and The Independent (22%). Just behind on 19% are Mail publisher Associated Newspapers, Reuters, Sun publisher News Group Newspapers and Conde Nast.

The smallest pay gap was of 5% at both the Press Association (which last year reported equal pay) and Haymarket. Meanwhile Newsquest paid women 68% more on average - the only publisher to skew towards women.

The average median gender pay gap has decreased from 15.7% in 2017. However some individual publishers have seen their pay gaps increase - for example Mail publisher Associated Newspapers (from 15% in 2017 to 19% in 2023), Hearst (from 17% to 18%) and Sky UK (from 8% to 12%)

Some of the publishers seeing the biggest positive change since 2017 have been The Economist (down from 30% to 16%), Telegraph Media Group (from 23% to 11%), Global (from 21% to 11%) and STV (from 17% to 9%).

The Telegraph said in its pay report: "While our gender pay gap has narrowed significantly over the last few years, and noticeably in relation to others across the industry, we know there is still work to do. We remain committed to reducing our pay gap year on year whilst continuing to attract and retain female talent."

We prioritise the median pay gap in our analysis as organisations such as Scottish charity Close the Gap have said the median is "considered to be a more accurate measure as it is not skewed by very low hourly pay or very high hourly pay".

However we also include the mean in our charts because, as Close the Gap added, "we know the very high-paid people tend to be men, and the very low-paid people tend to be women, and the mean paints an important picture of the pay gap because it reflects this issue".

The biggest mean gender pay gap in 2023 was at Conde Nast (27%) followed by The Independent (23%). The smallest mean gender pay gap was at Newsquest (2%) while two had mean pay gaps favouring women: Reach's local arm Local World (women paid 2% more) and CNN (women paid 9% more).

UK media bonus gender pay gaps

Looking at bonuses, men received more bonus pay than women at almost two-thirds (65%) of companies.

The biggest bonus gaps favouring men were at CNN (men receiving 59% more), Bloomberg (56%) and Reuters (53%).

Seven publishers reported equal bonus pay for men and women when looking at the median: Hearst, ITN, BBC, Times Media, News Group Newspapers, Telegraph Media Group and Future.

The biggest negative bonus gaps, meaning women received more, were at Local World (53%) and Newsquest (42%).

Note: The Press Gazette analysis uses the figures for Reach subsidiaries Mirror Group Newspapers and Local World. The full Reach plc figures were added to our tables after publication.

The post More women in top roles as media industry gender pay gap slowly narrows appeared first on Press Gazette.

The circulation of UK consumer magazines continued to decline in 2023, falling 12.4% when compared with the same ABC data for 2022.

The combined average monthly circulations of the magazines audited by ABC stood at 26.8 million in 2021, 24 million in 2022 and 21 million in 2023.

[Click here for 2022’s magazine ABCs]

However, more publications saw growth in 2023 than in 2022. In 2022 only 31 print or digital magazines saw circulations rise, compared with 53 in 2023.

Last year saw a huge increase in titles registering paid-for circulation via “all you can read” bundle subscription services such as Readly (see full breakdown of digital magazine ABC figures for 2023).

Two titles also opted into ABC auditing in 2023: Asda Magazine and the Jewish Chronicle.

Some publications report their circulation figures to ABC at the end of each half, rather than each year. In those cases Press Gazette has averaged the circulation figures provided for each half when including them in the charts below.

With an average print circulation of one million per month, Asda Magazine enters the chart as the second highest distribution of any UK mag – behind only Tesco Magazine, another free supermarket publication.

The most-circulated paid publication was the digital edition of The Economist, which distributed an average of 991,887 copies per month globally. Notably, that represents a 2.4% decline on last year, when its digital circulation was above one million.

Several BBC-branded magazines saw growth in the year, including BBC Top Gear Magazine (up 37%), BBC Sky at Night (up 44%), BBC Wildlife (up 70%) and BBC Science Focus, the average monthly circulation of which grew 88% to 132,360. (None of those magazines are run by the BBC itself.)

The Economist’s Espresso daily digital edition also grew notably, up 74% on the second half of 2022 to 21,775 in the same period in 2023. Espresso is one of the titles that reports its circulation to ABC twice a year: its average circulation across the whole of 2023 was 19,059.

Reach’s OK! and New! magazines meanwhile were among the biggest fallers in the year, both shedding more than a quarter of their circulation.

Other faster-than-average declines came at the New Scientist‘s digital edition (down 14% to 30,483), The Week‘s print edition (down 14.6% to 102,463) and Harper’s Bazaar (down 16.7% to 66,607).

Sajeeda Merali, the chief executive of the Professional Publishers Association (PPA), responded to the results with a blog post titled “Reasons to be cheerful: a sector defined by confidence, optimism and opportunity”, in which she argued that subscriptions, events and digital growth offer the way forward for publishers as print circulations dwindle.

The post Magazine ABCs 2023: Full breakdown of titles shows 12.4% circulation fall appeared first on Press Gazette.

Bauer Media Group is splitting its print and digital businesses, merging its international digital operations into one unit for the first time and moving away from a localised structure.

Amid the upcoming changes Chris Duncan, CEO for Bauer’s UK publishing business, has decided to step down after four years later this year.

He will be succeeded by two co-CEOs leading Bauer’s UK print business while a new international management team will lead digital operations across Germany, the UK, France and Poland.

Jan Wachtel, president of Bauer Media Group’s global publishing business, said: “Due to our localised structure, we are currently not making full use of our digital expertise. By merging the divisions, we will unlock new opportunities and better utilise Bauer Media Group’s international scale.”

Wachtel added that Duncan “has been an invaluable member of the global publishing leadership team and been a key contributor to the development of the strategy for our business”.

Duncan, previously MD of Times Newspapers, led all of Bauer’s print and digital publishing operations in the UK. The publisher said he had helped it “maintained its position as the UK’s bigger consumer magazine publisher and continued to build its reputation for delivering meaningful content to its readers across a variety of sectors and interests”.

Duncan said that over the past year he, Wachtel and other leaders within the business have been collaborating closely “to define the best strategy for the future of our publishing business in the UK and internationally”.

New co-CEOs to lead Bauer UK print business

Bauer’s magazine brands in the UK include Empire, Closer, Bella, Car, Grazia, Heat, Take a Break, That’s Life!, TV Choice, and Yours.

The print brands will now be led by Helen Morris and Steve Prentice, who have both been promoted from their roles as UK group managing directors to take over from Duncan later this year.

Morris, who has been leading Bauer’s UK lifestyle and entertainment brands, will have overall responsibility for content and editorial. Prentice, who has been leading the special interest and puzzle brands since June 2021, will take responsibility for operations including advertising, sales management and print production.

Wachtel said they were “the ideal candidates to lead our print operations in the UK into the next phase. In Helen and Steve, we have a leadership duo that understand perfectly how to establish the right conditions to continue to deliver products that meet the expectations of our readers.”

Bauer hires ‘best experts’ in German publishing to ‘build successful digital business’

Internationally, Bauer’s “ambitious” growth plans in digital will be led by three new executives joining the company with high-level experience at German publishers.

Stefan Betzold is joining this month as chief product marketing officer and will be responsible for monetising digital reach, introducing new digital business models and expanding profitability and turnover. Betzold joins from real estate agency Evernest which he co-founded in 2021, while he was previously managing director of Axel Springer overseeing its digital media businesses in Germany.

Also joining this month, Jan Rudolph will be chief content officer digital, “primarily responsible for expanding and optimally addressing digital target groups through customised content”. Rudolph’s previous roles include editor-in-chief of digital media at Weka Media Publishing, a consultant for several titles at Hubert Burda Media, and senior vice president of publishing and content distribution, meaning he was responsible for digital journalism products, at RTL Deutschland.

Writing on Linkedin, Rudolph said the job was “an opportunity to dive deep into the heart of digital transformation at this international successful media company”.

Explaining the new digital set-up, he said: “One of our key objectives is to unify all digital teams under a single vision. By fostering collaboration and leveraging the unique strengths of each team, we aim to create a more cohesive, efficient, and dynamic digital ecosystem. This unified approach will enable us to deliver exceptional content, drive engagement, and establish stronger connections with our audiences.”

Finally Walther Steinhuber will join as chief product and technology officer in April, making him responsible for the digital platform that will ultimately consolidate all Bauer’s digital products. Steinhuber is currently managing director at Süddeutsche Zeitung Digitale Medien and he has also worked at various management roles at Axel Springer between 2009 and 2015.

Wachtel said: “It is a significant achievement to have attracted these three top executives, a clear indication of our appeal in the industry. They are the best experts to build a successful digital business in publishing.”

The post Bauer’s UK publishing CEO Chris Duncan to step down amid leadership restructure appeared first on Press Gazette.

At the Future of Media Technology Conference 2022, there were no mentions of generative AI.

By contrast, this year there were two panels explicitly devoted to the subject and countless more discussions throughout the day.

Executives and journalists from publishers and vendors including ITN, Sky News, The Guardian, AP, Future, Bauer, GB News, Mediahuis, ArcXP and Affino shared how they have begun to use generative AI and what they see in the immediate future.

Generative AI as a productivity ‘co-pilot‘

Future chief executive Jon Steinberg said his company had experimented with generative AI by creating chatbots that have read the entirety of a site, for example computing product review title Tom’s Hardware, and allowing users to ask questions such as “What CPU is ideal for this computer case?”

“So there’s no hallucination, there’s no false data,” Steinberg said. “It’s read expert content and it’s coming up with a result from that.”

Future has also been using generative AI for productivity enhancement as “an editorial co-pilot”.

“We are not having AI write articles,” Steinberg said. “We’re having AI assist editors in pulling together things like product specifications, or editing video to different formats so that we can take video that’s on the site and post it to social.”

However, asked what opportunities he sees in ChatGPT he said: “To be honest, I see more opportunities in social right now.

“We have 180 million social followers. We’ve done relatively little to monetise in that place. It’s a diversification away from Google and it presents opportunities for us to create short-form video, a lot of which we can repurpose from video we’re already creating on the site.”

Steinberg added that he wasn’t convinced generative AI represents a threat to the core of the publishing model.

“I don’t see a world where AI replaces writers… We test mattresses. We test TVs. We test graphics cards. We test all these products and then write reviews about those products. Until the AI sprouts arms and is able to actually test the product, the bulk of what it’s going to be doing is what one of our writers calls a plagiarism stew.”

Matt Monahan, chief technology officer of CMS company ArcXP, suggested that focusing on generative AI’s productivity enhancement potential “maybe undersells it a little bit. Because even today, things like copywriting, copy editing, for instance – there’s a lot that these models are capable of today.

“And that doesn’t mean creating original content, that doesn’t mean editing. But we all employ people who do those tasks today.

“So it is something that people need to be considering right now… You need a real strategy around the question of: do we send our content to OpenAI or not… internally, companies need to develop a core competency around understanding this technology and being prepared for it.”

Trui Lanckriet, the head of data and insights at Mediahuis, told a later panel: “I think I don’t really agree that [generative AI is] all about simplifying the things that you’re already doing.

“I think we need to look at that technology as something that creates new kinds of value, new kinds of opportunities because it can be automated.”

[Read more: How Mediahuis is easing generative AI into its newsrooms]

How AI bots can preserve institutional memory

Markus Karlsson, chief executive of Affino, a business platform for media companies, said his company had implemented “when, why and how” bots to keep track of their own activity.

He said: “We’ve got the release bot, which is ‘when’ – so whenever we need to know something like when did we do something, we go and ask the when bot, because it’s bloody brilliant. It tells you exactly: ‘You did this three years ago; this is what you did.’

“We’ve got the why bot, which looks into all the specifications that we used to develop a product and it tells us why we made all those decisions, which is really useful – especially if the teams have evolved and people’s roles have evolved…

“And we’ve got the how bot, which is the one that tells us how to use our software. Now we used to tell our customers how to use the software – but one of the big things as a tech provider and working with media companies is that we will often work with half a dozen different teams over ten years.

“So getting the institutional knowledge into AI so that they are long-term support, the ‘AI factory concept’ – every organisation should be doing that.”

A/B testing of marketing copy

Asked how some of ArcXP’s clients have been using generative AI, Monahan said he had “seen a lot of good work around testing of copy”, but not purely on the editorial side.

“I’ve seen a bunch of examples of publishers who are using gen AI to create copy for their marketing pages for digital subscriptions, campaigns, call to action…

“And what you can do with that is you can create many, many, many different pieces of copy and content for those marketing pages, test them side by side at a scale that, frankly, is pretty difficult to do with human marketers.”

Similar to Future’s chatbots trained on expert content, Monahan said he’d seen “a lot of good experiments with private LLMs [large language models] happening among our customers today…

“We make it very simple to get your content to some of these platforms, to be able to augment the content of the metadata.”

Translations and monetising or reopening archival content

Monahan also touted generative AI’s use in translating content, saying “some specific subsets of the older LLMs are getting pretty good at quality translations.

“It doesn’t eliminate the need for human review of that content and editing it finally, but you can do a lot of that much faster than you used to in the past.”

ITN’s director of technology, production and innovation Jon Roberts said: “Our education business is using generative AI to repurpose content not just in a different language, but in level two French in a way that is really complex for people and [the AI] just eats it up.

“[In] our sports business, we’ve just run multi-language news bulletins from the World Athletics Championship in Budapest. That would have been cost-prohibitive before – we were now able to produce eight different language versions.”

Affino’s Karlsson described a leap his company had seen in ChatGPT’s ability to translate technical materials into less widely spoken languages.

“One of our clients is Iceland’s state electricity, and they’ve got very complex workflows. And they spend all their time trying to communicate these workflows internally and externally.

“We plugged it into ChatGPT 3.5 to try and provide meaningful instructions. It didn’t understand Icelandic and it didn’t use the right words to communicate it. We plugged it into ChatGPT 4 – it nailed it…

“A six-month progress in AI has [seen it go] from not really being able to communicate well around a technical subject in a language spoken by half a million people to nailing it. It’s really dramatic… That’s why I’m feeling pretty confident that AI is going to be a much bigger part of the whole equation than we think in the room today.”

More broadly, Karlsson said that “a lot of organisations have a lot of content that they haven’t been able to effectively convert into good data products with subscriptions. Now’s your chance.

“Start exploring that. I think all of a sudden there’s loads of opportunities for organisations to start monetising their content and media archives in ways that were really quite unimaginable.”

Derl McCrudden, AP’s vice president of news and head of global news production, said the agency has used AI to make old parts of its media archive that had been poorly-tagged accessible again.

“Anyone who’s spent any time clicking around a photo or a video archive will know how shocking the record-keeping is before a certain amount of time.”

AP has a bot named Merlin, which McCrudden said has “crawled our photo archive and it’s crawled our video archive. And you can now search through our library system for stuff that was not captured in the metadata by the human at the time that it was put into the archives.

“And it is phenomenal… it’s opening up a very rich archive to fresh eyes with the right search terms. In a way it’s kind of like fracking… We knew it was there but it’s very hard to find, and the AI has just solved it very quickly.”

Building the bones of formulaic articles – and, coming soon, converting digital pages to print

Bauer Media’s UK publishing chief executive Chris Duncan said his business has found that “where there are consistent layouts… you can use AI to create – not a whole article, and we would have the same view that there always has to be some kind of human editing task, but you can get an awfully long way in a very short amount of time in terms of creating the next the next barebones article.”

Cesare Navarotto, the chief product officer of CMS company Atex, said some of the company’s print customers “dream of systems that would be able to produce their print pages automatically starting from the digital content”.

He said they were 80% of the way toward making this possible, with much of a print page simple to populate from its digital counterpart. The business next plans to build non-generative AI tools that can automatically lay out a page “and shorten or lengthen text to make it fit better”, while highlighting what changes have been made so a sub-editor can check them.

Asked how far away this future was, Navarotto said it would be “the next iteration of the product basically”.

But using generative AI in live news coverage is still a way off, editors say

Speaking during a session on live news coverage, Sky News head of digital output Nick Sutton said the broadcaster had found some use in AI for fielding audience questions.

“What we’ve started doing is using an AI to sort of group some of those questions together so you can see what are the main topics that are of interest to users… because so many hundreds of questions are being submitted,” he said.

Like others, Sutton said Sky has been using AI for transcription and some image and headline testing. But when it came to writing even summaries of Sky News’ own content, he said they fell short: “We’ve experimented a little bit with summarisation, but I just think even when you’re giving it just the blog’s content to summarise, it can still have hallucinations.”

The Guardian’s head of digital (live) Claire Phipps said the same: “Reliability, verification, trust… I feel like we’re nowhere near being comfortable on those things in terms of generative AI.

“Whether we can use it to synthesise our own reporting… felt like more of a possibility”, she said, but “it’s not there yet, even if you ask it to do something on your own blog”.

Meanwhile AP’s McCrudden said that on SEO editing “we’re going to keep a human in the loop for the foreseeable future because our accuracy is our reputation, and the moment we lose that, we can’t get it back”.

And Tom Pollard, a senior producer and director at GB News, said that “we’ve got the ability to use a ChatGPT thing to write scripts, but it’s just got more drawbacks than positives… In the end you probably have to go through and just rewrite it anyway.”

AI and news publishers vs OpenAI and Google

On the matter of copyright issues arising from language models being trained on publishers’ content, Future’s Steinberg said “there’s a real discussion that needs to be had between publishers and Google, and OpenAI to a lesser extent”.

He said it was “really a conundrum” whether to block web crawlers that might scrape a site’s content because “you’re basically cutting off your traffic if you decide that you want to block the Google crawlers”.

[Read more: News publishers divided over whether to block ChatGPT]

Bauer’s Duncan said he thought regulation would be key to addressing the copyright issue.

“The idea that there will be a big cheque, fairly allocated to represent the true value of the content that’s being used – it’s never happened in history and I doubt it will.

“So we’re going to have to work, probably for quite a long time, to establish a framework… It will take, I think, the regulatory side a long time to catch up. And as publishers, we have to do what we’ve always done, which is: make very clear to regulators and government the argument we need to make, while making the best commercial outcomes that we can in the short term.”

Hearst UK’s chief transformation officer Elizabeth Minshaw added: “We need to learn from the past… I think we need to come up with something that’s mutually beneficial and no longer that antagonistic relationship… Is that a big cheque? I don’t know. But maybe it’s a different type of licensing agreement that’s working with, rather than against.”

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Bauer Media Group has hired Stuart Forrest to be its global search engine optimisation (SEO) director for publishing.

Forrest joins from Future, where he most recently served as senior vice president for audience and marketing before he left Future due to redundancy in April.

In his new role, Bauer said Forrest will oversee technical SEO, “creating effective and harmonised ways of working regarding SEO actions in UK and Germany including supporting our content strategy and portfolio for audience growth through organic traffic”.

Forrest will be based in London and begin in the job on 12 June, working “closely” with Bauer chief digital officer Charlie Calton-Watson and chief innovation officer Inga Leister.

Calton-Watson said of Forrest: “His expertise will perfectly complement the skills we already have within our talented teams and the unique brands. Building on these is a focal point for us as we look to accelerate the growth of our digital business.”

Forrest said Bauer has “enormous growth potential”.

“I’m pleased and excited to be joining Bauer at what’s clearly a key moment in its digital transformation journey… Bauer’s brands have a deserved reputation for quality, and this is an excellent platform from which to grow our digital audiences.”

Of his departure from Future, Forrest wrote on Linkedin: “I’m very proud of everything I achieved at Future, grateful to the amazing and talented colleagues I got to work with, and the brands I worked on.

“Future really is a company like no other, and working there taught me a huge amount about company culture and what a business needs from its leadership to be successful. A leadership role in a FTSE listed business is fast, furious and fulfilling, and I’m glad that I was able to make a difference, to my amazing teams, my colleagues and to the business.”

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Men were paid more on average than women at all but two of the 33 media companies that have submitted their gender pay gap figures for 2022.

The Press Association reported gender balance on both mean and median calculations for the snapshot date of 5 April 2022.

At regional publisher Newsquest, women were paid 33% more than men when the median was taken, while on the mean women were paid 9.3% more at broadcaster CNN International.

The biggest median gender pay gap favouring men was at Mirror Group Newspapers, with men on average paid 23.2% more, while the largest mean gap was at Conde Nast (30.3%). (Reach, of which MGN is a subsidiary, had a median pay gap of 8.9%.)

Having a gender pay gap does not mean men and women are not paid the same for doing the same jobs, but rather that there may be more men in higher-paid roles.

The average median gender pay gap has decreased from 15.7% in 2017 to 12.1% in 2022, while the average mean gap was down from 17.7% to 13.7%.

The latest dataset also shows that there are more men than women among the top 25% highest-paid employees at 91% of the major UK media companies in our list.

Magazine publisher Bauer had the only even split of 50/50 men and women in its highest-paid group, although it still had a median gender pay gap favouring men of 16% and a mean gap of 10%.

Meanwhile, Conde Nast and Hearst were the only publishers to have more women than men in the top quartile (57.3% and 67% women respectively) – although they both also had the highest proportion of women in their lowest-paid quartile (80% and 86% respectively). Conde Nast had a 21% median pay gap and 30% mean gap, while Hearst was on 12% for the median and 20% for the mean.

The companies most dominated by men in their top pay quartiles were Bloomberg and Sun publisher News Group Newspapers, with 21.5% and 24.6% of women respectively. In 2022 Bloomberg had a gender pay gap favouring men of 22% while NGN was at 20% (both companies have the same figure for median and mean calculations).

All but two of the media companies had a greater percentage of women in their bottom quartile for pay than their top quartile. This demonstrates how companies' gender pay gaps can be influenced by them having more men in highly-paid jobs.

The only exceptions were the Press Association, which had 32% of women in its bottom quartile for pay compared to 33% in the top and Newsquest with 27% in the bottom and 41% in the top.

Overall, of the 27 media companies that reported a figure for both 2017 and 2022 (and excluding Newsquest at which women were paid 33% more in 2022), the median gender pay gap fell at 63% of them and increased at 37%. The biggest increase in gender pay gap was at Newsquest Community Media – comprising the former Archant regional titles bought by Newsquest last year – which grew from a gap of 6.4% to 15.8% (but peaked at 17.4% in 2020).

The mean gap, excluding CNN which skewed female in both 2017 and 2022, improved at two-thirds of companies, got worse at 30% and stayed the same at one – William Reed (mean gap of 23%). The biggest increase in the mean gender pay gap favouring men came at Hearst, which went from 17.2% to 24%.

We have chosen to include both mean and median figures because they can show slightly different things.

The median pay gap is found by lining up all the salaries and finding the midpoint. Some organisations believe this results in a figure that is less skewed by outliers at the top or bottom of the pay scale.

Others, however, think the mean gap gives a good indication of when there is a greater number of highly-paid men at the top of the company and lower-paid women at the bottom. The mean is calculated by adding up every salary and dividing it by the number of them included.

Scottish charity Close the Gap says: "From a purely statistical standpoint, the median is considered to be a more accurate measure as it is not skewed by very low hourly pay or very high hourly pay.

"However, we know the very high-paid people tend to be men, and the very low-paid people tend to be women, and the mean paints an important picture of the pay gap because it reflects this issue. It is therefore good practice to use both the mean and the median when analysing or reporting on the gender pay gap."

For example, Reach - for which we have included the breakdowns for its subsidiaries Mirror Group Newspapers, Express Newspapers and Local World - said in its gender pay gap report: "Our pay gap is mainly due to lower female representation in senior roles and the legacy of a male dominated industry, particularly in the print area of our business. We are continuing
our focus on supporting female progression at all levels in the organisation."

The biggest median gender gap for bonus pay was Dow Jones International, where men received on average 63.8% more in bonuses last year. At Dow Jones, 62.3% of women and 65.8% of men received bonus pay.

The biggest mean gap for bonuses was at Haymarket, with a 66.5% gap. Some 71% of women and 80% of men received bonus pay.

Out of the media companies, 13 reported equal bonus pay for men and women last year, while four organisations (Sky UK, Future, Newsquest and Bauer) paid women more in bonuses than men on average.

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Bauer Media Group has sold its specialist flyfishing magazine Trout & Salmon to Edinburgh-based publisher Fieldsports Press.

The editorial team will transfer to Fieldsports with the move, and will continue to be led by managing director Dominic Holtam.

[Read more: Fieldsports Press acquires Future’s shooting brands]

Fieldsports chief executive and founder Simon Barr said: “This acquisition continues our journey of strengthening the British fieldsports media market and puts this heritage title, which was first launched in 1955, in great hands for the future.

“We will invest in the brand and offer new ways for audiences to connect with the most trusted voice in fly fishing for nearly 70 years. As a lifelong obsessive fly angler, I have read this title from the early 1980s. It’s a pinch-yourself-moment to have landed Trout & Salmon and a catch I am exceedingly proud of.”

The business will transfer on 28 April and the July issue on sale from 1 June will be the first published under Fieldsports.

Bauer Media Group continues to publish weekly Angling Times and monthly Improve Your Coarse Fishing as part of its angling magazine portfolio.

Bauer Media Group’s special interest managing director – publishing, Steve Prentice said: “It’s sad to see Trout & Salmon leave our angling portfolio but we are happy the title and its excellent editorial staff are moving to such a good home.”

Last year Fieldsports Press bought the Sporting Shooter, Rifle Shooter, Clay Shooter, Airgunner and Airgun World magazine titles from Archant after they were left out of Newsquest’s deal to buy the regional publisher.

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Digital consumer magazines saw a circulation increase of 22% in 2022, according to new ABC data.

The combined average circulation of titles reporting digital data separately to ABC increased from 2.5 million in 2021 to 3.1 million in 2022.

Three-quarters (75%) of 2022 digital copies were actively purchased – i.e. excluding free, membership and multiple copies.

In the UK and Irish digital markets, circulation was up 45% from 1.1 million in 2021 to 1.6 million last year.

• Full breakdown of print and digital magazine ABCs for 2022
• Magazine ABCs 2022: Private Eye leads UK news mags with best sales since 2017
• Magazine ABCs 2022: Slimming World only women’s interest title to see print growth

Titles can choose to audit their digital and print editions separately or provide ABC with a combined print and digital number. This analysis includes only titles that report digital data separately. Where there is a separate digital ABC certificate the figures are not de-duped (meaning they include bundled subscriptions where readers have more than one format included in the price).

Of the 138 titles that reported global digital data to ABC in both 2021 and 2022, 46 saw their circulation increase year-on-year, two remained unchanged, while 90 recorded a fall.

The overall increase in digital circulation in 2022 was driven by first time reports in 2022 for 13 titles as well as big growth for some names. Among titles reporting in 2022 for the first time was The Economist’s relaunched daily briefing app Espresso (12,546 global digital sales) and beauty brand Look Fantastic’s digital title The Highlight (146,599).

Among the biggest year-on-year growers were Immediate Media’s BBC Science Focus, which increased digital circulation 131% from 17,686 to 40,892, and Bauer’s Car magazine which grew by 56% from 21,317 to 33,222.

At the other end, titles with the biggest digital falls included Hearst-owned Women’s Health (down 34% to 15,188), Runner’s World (down 30% to 7,381) and Real Homes (down 23% to 10,476).

While most magazines report data once a year for the full calendar year, for titles that report more than once per year we have taken their latest ABC report and made like-for-like comparisons with the same period in 2021.

Overall, the biggest title by digital circulation size by a large margin in 2022 was the Economist which topped the one million mark to sell 1,012,592 digital editions globally (a 2% increase year-on-year). Its UK/ROI sales represent a relatively small proportion of its overall footprint (158,913 copies or 16% of global sales).

Among titles that are mostly actively purchased as opposed to given away for free, the next largest in terms of digital circulation were BBC Science Focus (40,892), Time Magazine’s EMEA edition (40,431) and Hello! (36,142).

Overall, the news and current affairs sector fared well, taking six of the top ten spots among actively purchased digital magazines. New Scientist (worldwide circulation of 35,627 excluding Australasia and US/Canada which are reported separately), The Spectator (34,164 excluding Australia), Time Magazine’s APAC edition (30,088) and Money Week (26,400) were all in the top ten.

Looking at year-on-year changes on a sector-by-sector basis, men’s lifestyle (where combined average circulation was up 17% year-on-year), countryside and country (up 9%) and motoring and motorcycling (up 5%) fared the best.

Magazine digital circulation 2022: Selected sector by sector round-up and full table of all titles below

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