Times editor Tony Gallagher has spoken about what he will and won’t do to reach young audiences and why he’s eyeing up AI to translate the newsbrand’s journalism into Spanish. Gallagher joined an editors’ panel at the INMA World News Media Congress in London (for which Press Gazette was a media partner) on Thursday. Gallagher joined The Times in September 2022, having moved across from editing News UK stablemate The Sun. He has also edited The Daily Telegraph and spent a long stint of his career at the Daily Mail. Gallagher discussed how The Times is trying to reach a younger audience while no ..read more

GB News co-lead investor Sir Paul Marshall has been replaced on the board of the broadcaster’s owner by Theodore Agnew, a former Treasury and Cabinet Office minister. Sir Paul said he would remain involved with GB News owner All Perspectives Ltd but was stepping down from the board after three years to focus on his other interests. He is expected to present himself as a frontrunner in the race to buy The Telegraph when the auction process reopens shortly, following the Government effectively blocking the purchase by Abu Dhabi-backed Redbird IMI. Lord Agnew has also recently been appointed as c ..read more

Layoffs feel like they’ve slowed down from a brutal 2023, but new Press Gazette analysis shows how the year really got off on a bad foot. As reported in our news media job cuts tracker, an estimated 980 media employees were affected by closures and rounds of redundancies in January alone, compared to 8,000 journalism job cuts across the UK, US and Canada last year. In the UK, Pink News, i-D Magazine, Design Week, GB News, Mail Sport, Vice and AltFi have all seen cuts, and in the latter two cases ceased publishing completely. Cautious media While tech and consultancy firms hired rapidly through ..read more

Every year new polls reveal plunging trust in journalism, like the recent Edelman survey which revealed just 31% of people in the UK trust the media. And is it any wonder given how much online news nowadays is based on thinly-sourced social media testimony? A glance at Mail Online’s Tiktok section or the Daily Mirror’s Reddit page will reveal hundreds of stories based purely on content which has been shared on the platforms. A prime example of this appeared on Mail Online last year when it published a story about a gym-going mum who had allegedly been told to give up her weights machine by ano ..read more

Messagespace, the political advertising network co-founded by Guido Fawkes editor Paul Staines, will no longer run ad sales for politics titles Conservative Home and Labour List. From July, advertising on the two sites will be handled by Total Politics Group, the Lord Ashcroft-owned company that publishes titles including The House, Politics Home and Conservative Home itself. Total Politics said the deal “advances Total Politics Group’s position as the largest, most diverse and best-connected political advertising platform in the UK”. Ad network sales no longer ‘really fit naturally with our c ..read more

Axel Springer chief executive Mathias Dopfner has explained why he signed a deal with OpenAI as he admitted that large language models could “completely destroy the media as we know it”. Speaking at the INMA World News Media Congress in London (where Press Gazette was a media partner), the boss of newsbrands including Bild, Politico and Business Insider was asked by one delegate why he had “made a pact with the devil” and what he made of the New York Times lawsuit against OpenAI. Dopfner said: “It is okay to do both in parallel and the two ways could contribute to a good outcome. “Our deal is ..read more

Suzi Watford, the former chief membership officer of Dow Jones and current Sirius XM chief growth officer, is moving to The Washington Post to take up the newly-created post of chief strategy officer. Watford will work under recently-installed chief executive William Lewis, a fellow Brit and her former boss at Dow Jones. The Washington Post said in a release that the new role is “designed to oversee the publication’s strategy, aligning it across all business functions and overseeing brand identity”. Watford was chief marketing and membership officer of The Wall Street Journal between 2014 and ..read more

New York Times executive editor Joseph Kahn has said covering Donald Trump is a challenge that requires a balance between sharing his statements, even when they are false, and contextualising but not censoring them. Speaking at the INMA World Congress of News Media in London on Wednesday, Kahn said covering Trump is a “particular challenge” and it takes a “certain skill” to write about him. “Our view is that when you have a candidate who does frequently indulge in conspiracy theories or depart from the facts and can hold an audience captive with long kind of soliloquies that actually don’t con ..read more

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 resu ..read more

New data reveals the UK had a bumper year for advertising in 2023, but news publishers lost out as more went to the big tech platforms. The Advertising Association/Warc Expenditure Report estimates the total UK ad market grew by 6.1% in 2023 to £36.6bn – with online formats now accounting for more than three quarters of the total. All the growth went to tech giants with Alphabet the biggest winner. Search advertising grew 11.9% last year to £14.7bn, meaning up to around £14bn was spent with Google on search alone. Google also makes money from selling advertising on Youtube and across the web v ..read more