Bauer is the UK’s biggest-selling magazine publisher, with an annual circulation of more than 97 million copies.
Across a diverse portfolio of brands, including TV Choice, Grazia, Empire, Heat, Closer, Car and MCN, it accounts for around one in four of all ABC-audited magazines sold in the UK.
It knows the formula for making successful magazines.
Like many publishers, though, Bauer’s on an ambitious digital transformation programme. This isn’t just about how to evolve its brands to make money online – it’s about enabling even the most ardent of print journalists to survive in a fast-changing digital world.
Through an innovative programme of peer-to-peer training, which started in 2023, Bauer is aiming to equip its entire publishing business with what it calls “Next Level Knowledge”.
One of the programme’s creators is Tim Pollard, recently promoted to content director (digital) during his eleventh year at Bauer. As a former chair of the British Society of Magazine Editors, Tim’s always been a champion of quality magazine journalism in its broadest sense, regardless of the channel.
I worked with Tim on What Car? in 2005. “When you rewind 20 years, when we worked together at Haymarket, we were writing great content and filing it – which seems almost one-dimensional now,” Tim says of that time.
“Now we’re expecting our teams to optimise their content via traditional search engines and on the website, but also to know how to get that same story to rank on Google Discover, Apple News, or get traction on social. Then there’s video and audio… It’s tough being a journalist now.
“So we set up Next Level Knowledge to help our people to have that very broad understanding and broad skill base. We’re trying to cherish what worked so well in print for decades and decades, but translate it wherever our digital audiences are.”
How did the Next Level Knowledge (NLK) programme come about?
“Back in 2022, we were given the challenge by Bauer’s then-CEO, Chris Duncan, to find a way to share the knowledge from the core digital team at Bauer, and seed it across the whole of UK publishing. We wanted to make sure that everybody benefited – we believe no person should be left behind when it comes to digital upskilling.
“So the programme is about creating a rising tide of digital knowledge that everybody can access. We decided to start it as a peer-to-peer exercise. This was never a question of ‘let’s spend lots of money and get external experts or consultants in’.
“It was all about identifying the best practice in our own business – spotlighting really good work, where innovation was happening, and where people were having tangible results.
“If there’s a brand who’s doing particularly well on Apple News+, for example, we wanted to zoom in and try to unpick why it’s working so well, before sharing that knowledge back internally.
“So it’s all about helping our people upskill, learn, develop and – crucially – be ready for this multichannel, fast-moving, complicated world of modern journalism.”
How does Next Level Knowledge work in practice?
“We identify a different topic for each learning session – which we simply call drop-ins. They’re 30-minutes long and each one is a Teams call. There’s no in-person learning. We’re a business with bases in London and Peterborough, and with hybrid working, so the sessions need to be accessible from different locations.
“Some of the secret sauce is keeping the sessions short. Everyone has time for a 30-minute drop-in. After some experimentation with days and times, we’ve found that Thursdays at 11.30am or 2.30pm work best for attendance.
“We aim to run them fortnightly, so we’ve had 57 sessions since the start of 2023. We get a really good turnout – in 2024, we had an average of 120 attendees at each one, with some of the most popular [about AI and Bauer’s digital strategy] hitting as many as 320.
“They’re open to the whole of publishing, not just editorial staff, and get a very high customer satisfaction rating, too. We ask attendees to score each session afterwards, and last year the average score people gave was 9.5 out of ten. The responses weren’t all me, I promise!”
How do you plan the topics you want to cover?
“There’s a small committee of us, led by me, with great support from Gareth Evans (head of motorcycling in the digital team on MCN). The two of us work really closely with the chief digital officer, Charlie Calton-Watson, and a few colleagues elsewhere across the business.
“We try to identify topics that we feel are strategically important to us. Some things just routinely need to be covered. But there’s also that strategic element. For example, Bauer has moved quite overtly into content commerce. And that requires a very different type of content creation and journalism.”
What are some of the topics you’ve focused on?
“I’ve already mentioned Apple News+ as a recent example. And we’ve delivered lots of training from the audience and SEO team. We want to equip our people with the knowledge to win at SEO and make our content find its audience.
“We’ve covered really disparate things from heartland digital topics like that all the way through to training on IPSO guidelines. As a big, responsible publisher, this works well as a refresher for people who’ve been in journalism for a long time, but also for people who are just starting out.”
What’s the secret to getting staff to engage with the training?
“We spend an inordinate amount of time on the subject lines for the sessions, so that when those invites hit people’s inboxes, they have that irresistibility of a really well-written headline. As journalists, we should be good at headlines and sells!
“So Gareth and I go back and forth to get the subject line just so. We all know the power of an amazing headline or strong text link that makes you want to click, and that’s what we strive for with these.
“We’ve got one coming up soon called: ‘Four things that will help us win in Google in 2025’. Topics like that are perfect for the start of the year, when we want to convey important changes. A few other great examples from the last year or two are:
- Innovation | AI tools, tips and tricks your colleagues are using right now
- Video skills | How to use short-form video to boost engagement
- Data discovery | Your introduction to GA4 and how website analytics are changing this summer
- Traffic drivers | How to win at Google Discover
- Digital design | Make your stories look great in a templated world
- Winning at Apple News | Heat’s successful formula for bespoke content
- Archive content | How to make your archive work harder for your brand
- Horizon scanning | How to spot the next big thing in your market.”
What’s been the most eye-opening topic that you’ve covered so far?
“Of course, AI has been one of the biggest. We know we’re living through a time of transformative change. And the editorial community has been really feeling that. We want to make sure we stay ahead of the curve.
“It’s important that we help to prepare people for the changes happening in front of our eyes. So we’ve had particularly strong take-up around AI and its impact in the newsroom.
“If we rewind to 18 months ago, we had some quite exploratory, almost mindset training around AI. But the last one we had was called ‘AI tools, tips and tricks your colleagues are using right now.’
“With that title, we wanted to make it real and say, ‘Look, this isn’t something that’s just conceptual, people are actually using it here and now’. In that session we had around seven or eight really concrete case studies of people using AI across Bauer.
“Let’s not beat around the bush. We’ve got some people who are absolute AI fanatics and enthusiasts in the company. We’ve got a lot of people in the middle who are trying to keep up and still wrestling with it. And we’ve got a few people who are sceptics. So it’s about showing that this is not necessarily a scary topic, and I think Next Level Knowledge has helped to land that message.”
Are there any other topics where it’s been hard to bring people along with you?
“In the last few years we’ve moved into commercial and affiliate content in quite a big way. We’ve tried to raise the knowledge of how that works as an art form and a skill. And it’s all about trust.
“The fundamental tenet of good journalism is making sure we write about products and review them in a trusted fashion. And we’ve got these amazing brands, like Today’s Golfer – a very trusted, blue-chip sports title that’s been around for decades. But it’s also the kind of product where people will click and buy if they read a review of some equipment on the website or in the magazine.
“We’ve learned a lot about how we can do affiliate content in a way which maintains real independence, trust and authority – all the things we’re trying to do as publishers. And the learnings are very shareable to someone writing about motorcycles or maybe films. We’re shuffling the knowledge from one thing right across our portfolio of 40-plus different titles.”
Do you think Bauer is making faster progress or getting better commercial results because of Next Level Knowledge?
“Bauer’s digital business is certainly growing. Our footprint in some of the core areas is growing very fast, and the focus on commercial content has really borne fruit. I can’t give exact numbers for commercial reasons, but that revenue has grown significantly in 2024. And a lot of our websites are enjoying large growth too. Going back to Today’s Golfer, that’s had a 45% increase in sessions in 2024, for example.
“Apple News is another area of significant growth. Our engaged minutes on there grew 125% in January 2025, across the whole UK portfolio, as we become more skilled at storytelling on that channel. The big win for us is on the paywalled ‘News+’ side, and brands like Grazia or Car magazine are doing really well there.
“I’m not saying Next Level Knowledge is behind all of this success, but it’s certainly helped share the knowledge. At the heart of success lies brilliant, independent journalism – as readers of Press Gazette know – whether you’re talking to big consumer audiences or niche B2B audiences.
“And that’s what our job is nowadays, as editors – to make sure we’re clinging to the kernel of truth of what good journalism is about, but adding the special sauce of digital wizardry. And that’s why Next Level Knowledge is trying to demystify and democratise this, to make sure we are all equipped with those skills, and able to keep storytelling relevant.
“It’s never been more important, because it’s tough out there. Publishing is hard and the digital landscape is always evolving. I think Next Level Knowledge is like a buoyancy aid with a compass, helping us orient ourselves for survival in this pretty volatile environment.”
What do you think other publishers could learn from Bauer’s approach?
“We’ve proven that we can really help our people when we come together.
“Look internally – you don’t always have to look externally. Publishers tend to attract bright people who are very passionate about their area of specialism. Those kinds of people will probably make good speakers and good teachers. So seek out the evangelists in your team.
“Peer-to-peer learning is also more approachable and has a certain persuasiveness that helps to achieve that rising tide of knowledge. But it also gives people a moment in the spotlight, and rewards the teams who are doing well.
“It happens to be free, too! It’s important to note that we haven’t had a penny of investment to do this. It’s been done through ingenuity, passion and the desire to pick out the stories and skills we want to amplify around the business.
“It’s a fun project to be involved with, and I think together we’ve made something really quite special.”
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