The UK’s top-paid media executives saw their compensation grow at a slower pace last year, but most nonetheless saw an overall increase in pay.
As in April 2024, when Press Gazette last calculated the UK media rich list, last year the two top-paid media executives both worked for data and consumer information giant RELX, the biggest media business in the UK by turnover.
Chief executive Erik Engstrom took the top spot, receiving total compensation of £13.5m (on fixed annual pay of £1.6m), while his chief financial officer Nick Luff was second on £7m. Both saw their total remuneration decrease by 10% compared with a year earlier, however.
The pair were followed by Stephen A Carter, the group chief executive of another B2B information powerhouse Informa, whose compensation improved 2% year-on-year to £4.2m.
ITV boss Carolyn McCall was the best-paid broadcast executive on the list, earning pay of £4.1m in 2024. The best-paid executive at a consumer print/text media organisation was an unnamed executive at Daily Mail publisher DMGT (likely to be chief executive Tim Collier or chairman Lord Rothermere).
RELX’s Engstrom was the second-best paid FTSE 100 chief executive in the UK in 2023, according to the High Pay Centre, behind only AstraZeneca boss Pascal Soriot.
In this year’s ranking 30 executives (54%) out of the 56 for whom prior year pay information is available saw their overall compensation rise and 24 (43%) saw it fall. The median change was a 2.2% increase while the average change was a 22% increase. Total remuneration rose year-on-year by 1.2% or £1.1m.
In Press Gazette’s most recent ranking of the top UK media companies by revenue, the 50 businesses included collectively increased their revenue year-on-year by 3.3% in total.
In Press Gazette’s last media rich list, published in April 2024, 34 of the 56 executives (61%) for whom prior year pay information was available saw increases while 20 saw a fall, with the median a 3% increase and the average a 38% increase (skewed by a small number of very large increases).
Of the 36 named executives this year 25 are men and 11 are women. The three top-earning executives are men while the three bottom-earning ones are women. Dividing the cohort into thirds, women account for two of the 12 top-earning named executives, three of the middle 12 and half of the bottom 12.
Median pay for named male executives was £1.3m and £700,000 for named female executives. Average pay meanwhile was £2.1m for the men and £1.1m for the women. Whereas in Press Gazette’s last analysis Carolyn McCall was the sole woman to rank among the top-ten paid named executives, she was joined this year by Economist Group chief executive Lara Boro.
A dozen print or online publisher executives earned £1m or more, led by the top DMGT director, an unnamed executive at Telegraph Media Group (£2m), another at the Financial Times (£1.8m) and Boro.
Broadcast executives cover a broader span of pay grades. Although only four earned more than £1m, all those four (ITV’s McCall, unnamed executives at Global and Sky and ITV’s CFO and COO Chris Kennedy) made more than anyone on the print list except the DMGT boss. Executives at Channel 4, the BBC and STV make up the remainder of the broadcast list.
Press Gazette media rich list 2025: methodology
Press Gazette’s media rich list comprises all the media executives we were able to find who are paid £400,000 or more at UK-listed news media and magazine publishers, broadcasters and information and data companies with a significant publishing arm. A handful of American companies that filed accounts in the UK are represented, namely Condé Nast’s UK subsidiary and international travel publisher Ink Global.
The list is based on public data found in the accounts of the UK’s biggest publishing companies: we have checked filings for each of the UK’s 50 biggest media companies as well as other prominent companies that do not appear on that list. As in previous years we have used a minimum threshold of £400,000 annual salary as the floor for inclusion on the list. If you believe we have missed an executive off, please email pged@pressgazette.co.uk to let us know.
For each executive we have used the most up-to-date pay information available. Some companies have only published information covering 2023, while others have published full accounts for the financial year up to some point in 2024. Those companies who have not reported data for a financial year ending in 2024 are marked on the main table with asterisks.
While publicly-traded companies have to disclose executive director pay in their annual financial reports, including director names and the various components of their pay, UK private companies only need to disclose the amount received by the highest-paid director in their Companies House filings. They do not have to identify that executive or report the pay packages of other individual executives – meaning that some high-earning executives at private companies that may have otherwise made this list could not be included.
The BBC discloses the pay of any senior managers earning more than £150,000, and the four of them making more than £400,000 have all been included in our list.
Some executives that appeared in our previous lists may not appear on this one, for example where a company has been taken private.
Highly-paid executives from other companies (such as News Corp) also do not feature on the list for a variety of reasons, including that they were registered abroad or had not disclosed full director pay in their Companies House accounts. For example, News UK’s Rebekah Brooks, who was one of the best-paid executives in our 2022 ranking, no longer appears on this list as the company’s latest filing only reflects the fraction of Brooks’ pay deemed to apply to services to News UK (which is below £400,000).
The list only covers the top executives at companies and does not include the pay of talent. Editors are only included in cases where they served on the executive board of outlets.
Guardian News and Media was the only private company to identify its top-earning executives. Chief executive Anna Bateson earned the most with £700,000, up 75% year-on-year from the 2023 financial year which she joined the company halfway through. She was followed by Guardian editor-in-chief Katharine Viner, who earned £600,000 (no change on 2023) and chief financial and operating officer Keith Underwood (£500,000, down 17%).
Which media executives had the biggest pay increases or decreases?
One caveat for the pay increase data sourced from Companies House is that, because it is provided for the highest paid director in a given year rather than a named individual, the highest paid director one year may differ from the one the year before. This creates some ambiguity when analysing year-on-year changes to compensation.
For example, the largest proportional increase of any executive’s pay on the list came at Hearst UK, where the top-paid director saw their remuneration rise 277% from £145,000 in 2022 to £546,000 in 2023. But it is not clear whether one person saw their pay increase that much, in part because the large change in remuneration coincides with a change of leadership.
Hearst’s current chief executive, Katie Vanneck-Smith, joined the business in December 2022: it is possible she was the highest-paid executive at the company in 2023, but because she joined late in the year it is less likely she would have been the best-paid in 2022 (but not impossible, as she could have been paid a signing bonus).
Mid-year leadership changes also influence several other apparently large changes in pay. The second-largest increase was for Future’s Jon Steinberg, who’s remuneration in the year to 30 September 2024 was £1.3m – up 138% from 2023, when he joined in April, seven months into the company’s financial year.
The biggest pay change for an executive whose role did not change mid-year was secured by Autotrader Group boss Nathan Coe, whose total remuneration jumped 133% to £3m, followed by Reach’s Jim Mullen, whose compensation rose 121% to £1.2m. Autotrader’s chief operating officer Catherine Faiers and chief financial officer Jamie Warner were not far behind, receiving increases of 110% and 109% respectively.
At the other end of the scale the biggest fall in compensation was for the unnamed highest-paid director at Lord Heseltine’s Haymarket group, where that individual’s remuneration fell 53% to £1.7m. They were followed by Ian Katz, chief content officer at Channel 4, whose total pay fell 43% year-on-year because he declined to take a bonus amid a record deficit at the broadcaster.
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