US local news publisher Advance Local has gone from zero to 250,000 paid digital subscribers in the last eight years.

SVP for digital consumer revenue Ann Poe explained how the group evolved from a simple premium content mode to having a dynamic paywall which makes decisions on whether to gate content based on individual users.

VP for sales at Mather Ariel Burkett explained how Mather's Sophi platform ingests user data to present individuals with an offer most likely to maximise revenue for the publisher.

This episode is sponsored by Mather.

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Online entrepreneur Brian Alvey has been building publisher websites pretty much since the world wide web began in the mid 1990s.

Having lived and worked through every wave of dramatic digital disruption since then, the Wordpress VIP chief technology officer knows what he is saying when he says about AI “This wave is up there with fire, steam engines, electricity and refrigeration.”

He explains why the AI revolution is fundamentally different to previous changes in online publishing and shares how publishers should react.

They must embrace AI, he says, to automate workflows and speed the pace of development whilst avoiding both AI and human slop.

And above all publishers must cherish and promote their direct and owned relationships with their audience (via websites and email).(This episode was sponsored by Wordpress VIP)

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Hello! magazine was one of many publishers that saw website referrals from Google Discover plummet last year.

Chief content officer Sophie Vokes-Dudgeon talked Press Gazette UK editor Charlotte Tobitt through the "year of transformation" that has followed.

Hello! has fought back by making the most out of syndication channels while building its own community for the future.

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Dominic Ponsford asks magazine industry titan Mike Soutar how to tackle modern publishing industry challenges looking at the lessons of history.

The Shortlist Media founder and former IPC Media director is something of a history buff. And he has just launched a new eight-part podcast series with Immediate Media’s History Extra called History’s Greatest Leaders.

How would Genghis Khan or Elizabeth I go about tackling an unequal struggle with tech titans, or deal with the decline of a magazine publishing empire?

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In this special edition, Charlotte Tobitt and Dominic Ponsford unpick the fallout from Prince Harry and others' historic privacy action failure against Associated Newspapers.

Includes interviews with media lawyer Louis Charalambous who said Prince Harry should apologise for a post-trial statement which was "beyond the pale" and which proved he is a terrible loser. We also heard from former Daily Mail showbiz editor Nicole Lampert about the "terrifying" ordeal of having her reputation put on trial on the basis of zero evidence.

What happens next? Charalambous gives his view on Harry's chances of winning an appeal and explains who is likely to pick up the £50 million legal bill.

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Candr Media CEO Chris Dicker has seen its flagship website - Trusted Reviews - be pillaged by AI bots over the last 18 months.

He spoke to Press Gazette about a new legal tactic which uses a branch of law dating back to the Romans to secure justice and perhaps force big tech to the negotiating table.

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In the latest edition, Dominic Ponsford and Charlotte Tobitt talk about the latest changes to Google search. Agentic search will probably stay niche, but forcing AI mode into conventional search queries is a new threat to publisher referral traffic.

They also discuss the publishing dilemma du jour - should publishers block LLMs or do all they can to optimise content to show up in ChatGPT-style answers?

And publishers in the UK and US have been caught out by another AI-generated hoax. What can we learn from the curious case of the 'LADYBOYS IN BLUE' - the Thai police officers who didn't dress as carnival dancers to carry out an undercover drug dealer arrest?

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Axios dropped its output by almost a quarter but increased page views by almost a third at the start of 2026.

Head of news Ben Berkowitz told Press Gazette UK editor Charlotte Tobitt about why they stopped chasing clicks and started focusing on stories that "actually matter".

Berkowitz also shared his advice for other newsroom leaders going through a similar strategy change.

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