Welcome to Episode 15 of the Out of Office podcast, recorded in December 2024 with Chris Duncan as we walked along the Thames on a cold winters day in London.

Chris and I met many years ago while both working at News UK, where he ultimately became MD at The Times. He then moved from news media to magazines as the CEO of Bauer Media, managing a portfolio of over 100 magazine titles. It was this work that we spend most of our time talking about in the episode, as we try and piece together what the future of magazines might look like... 

As always, give me a shout if you have any suggestions on who you’d like me to chat with or any feedback at all. It’d be great to hear from you.

Jonny

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Welcome to Episode 14 of the Out of Office podcast, recorded in January 2024 with Karl Wells as we walked along the West Side Highway in Manhattan towards Chelsea Piers. 

Karl and I were colleagues many years ago at News UK before he headed over to New York to work at the Wall Street Journal. He spent a number of years there heading up subscriptions before joining The Information a couple of years ago. At the time of recording, he’s just a couple of weeks away from joining The Washington Post as Chief Growth Officer - he’s certainly doing something right!

We spoke about his time both at The Journal & The Information, subscription strategies in general, and what he thinks about 2024 and what it’s going to bring to news media. It’s definitely worth a listen if you’re focusing on reader revenue right now - Karl’s got a lot of information to share. I’d definitely recommend listening - I hope you enjoy it! 

As always, give me a shout if you have any suggestions on who you’d like me to chat with or any feedback at all. It’d be great to hear from you.

Jonny

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Welcome to episode 13 of the Out of Office podcast.

In this episode I take a stroll around Central Park with Ariscielle Novicio, a News Corp colleague of mine from many years ago and now CTO at New York Post. We reminisce about two sister projects we worked on back in 2010 that were both designed to change the face of news media. While mine didn't see the light of day, Ariscielle's, The Daily, did make it, and for some time as a very high production newspaper for the iPad.

We talk quite a lot about those projects, how they were pulled together, and what ultimately ended them. We also had a completely unplanned and highly coincidental bump in with Paul Mellor, who used to be CTO at the Wall Street Journal. So bizarrely, we had the New York Post, the Journal, and the Times of London together at the same time, in the same park. No idea how that happened, but that was quite fun!

It's a really interesting chat with Ariscielle and we covered all sorts of different topics, from her experience running technology at one of the biggest newspapers in the US to back in the times we were doing crazy stuff on the iPad, and a whole lot of other things. It's definitely worth a listen, so do give it a go.

I hope you enjoy it and as always, give me a shout if you have any suggestions on who you’d like me to chat with or any feedback at all. It’d be great to hear from you.

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Welcome to episode 12 of the Out of Office podcast.

In this episode I chat with Kerin O’Connor, publisher and subsequent CEO of The Week - an amazing business that’s very close to our hearts here at Pugpig as our first ever app we launched together with Kerin and his team back in 2011. We walked around Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens and talked about Kerin’s time at Dennis Publishing, how they built an incredibly successful brand and subscription business at The Week, and more recently one of the fastest growing news brands ever with The Week Junior.

A little over a year ago, Kerin set up his own business called Atlas - a consultancy specialising in subscription businesses. So we spent a bit of time speaking about the sort of work Kerin’s doing right now and subscription businesses in general. Lots to get stuck into in this episode...

I hope you enjoy it and as always, give me a shout if you have any suggestions on who you’d like me to chat with or any feedback at all. It’d be great to hear from you.

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Welcome to Episode 11 of the Out of Office podcast, which I recorded in the summer of 2021 with Alan Hunter, former head of digital for The Times and The Sunday Times, where we walked around Alexandra Palace and talked about Alan’s days at News UK - his shift from journalist to digital guru, how print and digital have converged over recent years and how to build a world class digital news media team. 

We also had a quick chat about something that comes up time and time again - which is the better model for digital news media, periodical editions or continuous feeds - or possibly even something in-between? Listen in and you’ll get Alan’s views and some insight into how they’ve approached this at the Times.

Thanks again to Alan for being so generous with his time, and as always, if you have any suggestions on who you’d like me to walk and talk with, or if you have any feedback at all - just give me a shout - I’d love to hear from you…

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Welcome to Episode 10 of the Out of Office podcast, which I recorded with Matt Kelly, the founder of The New European, and which is the second of two bite sized chunks.

In this first part (episode 9), we talked about Matt’s earlier days as a regional newspaper journalist, his views on the news media in general, his time at Archant, and the birth of The New European.

In this second part, he takes us through how he secured the investment to buy his creation, The New European from Archant and how he’s new building the business pretty much from scratch (also with a little help from Team Pugpig of course!)

It was a really interesting chat as we walked through Highbury Fields, on a typically British summer’s day, alternating from beautiful sunshine to torrential rainstorm from one minute to the next...

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Welcome to Episode 9 of the Out of Office podcast, which I recorded with Matt Kelly, the founder of The New European, and which I've split into two bite sized chunks.

In this first part, we talk about Matt’s earlier days as a regional newspaper journalist, his views on the news media in general, his time at Archant, and the birth of The New European.

In the second part (episode 10), he takes us through how he secured the investment to buy his creation, The New European from Archant and how he’s new building the business pretty much from scratch (also with a little help from Team Pugpig of course!)

It was a really interesting chat as we walked through Highbury Fields, on a typically British summer’s day, alternating from beautiful sunshine to torrential rainstorm from one minute to the next...

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Welcome to Episode 8 of the Out of Office podcast, which I recorded with Justin Pearse in early January 2021

Justin Pearse is first and foremost a writer, and currently the editor of new digital age (after having spent a number of years also editor of new media age, and soon to be launching e-commerce age). In between all that Justin was heading up branded content at The Drum and Digiday - so he’s been writing about media and marketing pretty much his whole career.

We took a covid compliant walk around Kelsey Park in Beckenham and talked about trade publishing, about launching new media brands, about the continuing growth and importance of ecommerce to publishers and about how events are continuing to evolve now that we’re getting to grips with what works best in a world where we continue to be doing everything remotely.

Just a little warning in advance that you’ll hear a mix of ducks, cars, children and maybe a certain amount of sniffing in the background on what was a chilly, damp January day in London, but hopefully they will just add a touch of texture to what was an extremely interesting conversation with Justin. Here we go…

I suspect we’ll have a short hiatus now that at least in the UK we’re pretty much housebound, and I think this podcast works so much better when we’re talking face to face, but I hope to be back soonish with more walks and chats for you. If in the meantime there’s someone you’d like me to walk and talk with, or if you have any feedback at all - just give me a shout - I’d love to hear from you…

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Welcome to Episode 7 of the Out of Office podcast, which I recorded with Esther Kezia Thorpe in June 2020

At the time of recording, Esther had recently left her role at Dennis publishing so that she could commit herself fully to her own consulting business and also to the ever growing media voices empire which now includes a daily media roundup newsletter, an annual podcast awards event and of course their own media voices podcast - all of which we cover in our conversation and all of which I would recommend you check out and sign up to if you haven’t already!

I hope you enjoy it - as always, if you have any feedback do let me know...

Jonny

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Welcome to Episode 6 of the Out of Office podcast, which I recorded with James Hewes, the President and CEO at FIPP (the international network for global media) a few months ago when we were all in lockdown.

We chatted about the future of consumer magazine businesses and how the need to diversify is becoming ever more important. We also touched on live events and how they can survive in a world where large gatherings can’t come together - well timed given he’s just managed one of the biggest online events that the publishing industry has seen to date.

In fact I’d recommend you heading to FIPP.com to have a look - there’s loads of great content on there, including a sneak preview of our very own 2020 state of the digital publishing market report in which we got to interview 40 execs from across the industry about what’s keeping them up at night and where they are focusing their effort in the coming year.

I hope you enjoy it!

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