Transformation work at Newsquest Scotland is paying off as it passed 40,000 digital subscribers.
The subscriber total includes 10,000 from six standalone sports sites launched within the past four years and about 6,000 from Scottish local titles.
The majority of paying online readers come from flagship brands The Herald and pro-independence title The National. Digital subscribers have grown 10,000 in the past 15 months.
Newsquest Scotland editor-in-chief Callum Baird told Press Gazette February was Newsquest Scotland’s “best month ever” for net subscriptions growth.
He said: “We think we’re in a strong position. We’ve done a lot of transformation over the last two-and-a-half years… we’re really just starting to see the benefit of all that work pay off in the numbers.”
UK-wide, Newsquest has been building its local subscriptions strategy over the past five years and reached 100,000 paid digital subscribers (including the now 40,000 in Scotland) in September.
The Herald has had a paywall for 15 years and The National has been targeting online subscriptions since its 2014 launch. Baird, who was editor of The National between 2015 and 2019, said he made growing online subscription the main editorial target adding, “Our growth has really accelerated the last couple of years”.
Newsquest titles writing long-form content designed to convert subscribers
Asked why that has happened, Baird responded: “We’re just doing everything better, I think… I know there’s no silver bullet to these things.”
But he said the newsroom mindset has changed, particularly on The Herald and The National, so writing content that might convert subscribers is the “number one focus”.
Staff are told: “Don’t worry about page views. We want you to just drive subscriptions. We want people to come back and read your stuff. And we want real quality from you.”
This is why, Baird said, The Herald regularly seconds small groups of journalists to work on a monthly project resulting in several stories based around one subject published over the course of a week. Examples include the future of Glasgow, depopulation in the Highlands and an investigation into the Glasgow School of Art fires. The aim is to have impact not only on digital subscriptions but on brand awareness and to get talked about in Parliament and by other stakeholders in Scottish public life.
The Herald and The National, as well as the Scottish sports sites, are more subscriber-driven than the rest of Newsquest. Newsquest Scotland’s smaller local titles have a more similar subscriptions strategy to Newsquest titles in England and Wales, with a slightly different balance sought between audience/scale and subscribers and more content available to read for free for non-subscribers.
Newsquest chief executive Henry Faure Walker told Press Gazette in November 2023 he did not think digital subscriptions were “going to be the main revenue stream for us… but it’s an important part of the mix”. However, Baird said for The National digital subscriptions revenue has more than covered the cost of the newsroom for several years already.
Baird noted that The Herald and The National, as well as the Scottish sports sites, have put a higher price on their subscriptions. For example The Herald costs £62.99 per year for full advert-free digital access, or £134.99 including the digital edition, this compares to Darlington-based Newsquest title the Northern Echo which costs £52 for advert-light access or £55 with the digital edition and app.
Certain content can only be viewed by subscribers while other articles may be locked using technology which guesses how likely a particular user is to pay.
Baird asaid: “The other key thing for us is that we’re not afraid to launch new platforms and new products into areas where we think there’s an opportunity in the market. And that’s where we’ve seen a lot of our success in sports journalism in particular.”
Newsquest Scotland sports sites subscriptions success
Jonny McFarlane, head of sport at Newsquest Scotland, joined the company four years ago to launch the first of the standalone sports sites: The Rangers Review and The Celtic Way.
The portfolio now contains the Hearts Standard, Hibs Observer, Scotland Rugby News and, most recently, the experimental Substack-based Killie Chronicle.
He previously worked at the Reach-owned Daily Record for four years and told Press Gazette he had grown disillusioned with its page views-based strategy which saw him writing up to 15 stories a day.
“I wanted to move to a company that had the same ethos as I did, which was to build a community of readers that liked and respected your content for the content’s sake,” he said.
“I’d long grown to believe, as an industry watcher myself, that subscriptions were the only way to do that, or the way to do that in the moment that we launched the sites. So I was desperate to get into somewhere that aligned with my vision for where Scottish football coverage should be.”
McFarlane said it was a gamble “with so much competition around Rangers and Celtics in Scotland – there’s so many websites that aren’t even really aligned to major publishers that gobble up so much traffic”.
But he aimed to capture “a sense of what I wanted myself and what my friends wanted from football coverage, rather than clickbait that makes you sort of roll your eyes when you read the headline and you know the story is not very good just by the headline without even clicking on it. I wanted to create a sense of real value where journalists had the opportunity to go out and meet contacts and speak to people.”
The sports sites, which mostly have two dedicated writers each, publish a maximum of two longer stories a day which are behind a hard paywall. This is supplemented by news provided by a team that works more widely across those and the Newsquest Scotland brands, with that content on a metered paywall.
Editor-in-chief Baird cited a recent example of this strategy in action: the breaking story about a potential takeover of Rangers by US investors which five or six years ago would have resulted in the publication of as many stories as possible but now saw the team working on one story to “make it count and make it so that everybody has to come back to us” for the full, exclusive account.
Speaking on Tuesday (4 March), Baird said the takeover news had led to the addition of 800 subscribers to the Rangers Review in ten days.
Baird said he saw the sports project as “high-quality, long-form journalism around these clubs,” citing The Athletic as a similar example, “which I don’t think was being done in Scotland. The sports content of Scotland was very traffic and audience focused.” This is combined, he added, with a feeling that the sites are “by fans and for fans” amid a growth in other fan-led media in Scotland.
He added that by creating multiple sites rather than one pan-Scottish brand, they could “market those sites very differently to each fanbase and obviously partner with the clubs in various ways as well”.
High-quality video increases brand awareness and boosts revenue
Another key element, he said, is a focus on video and “regular, high-quality video on Youtube” in particular”. He said this increases brand awareness but is also a “decent revenue driver” from the platform’s revenue share and local sponsorships.
McFarlane said the shift from print to multimedia journalism has “really damaged generalism. There’s nothing more specific than a Rangers website or a Manchester United website or a Celtic website…
“And I think that’s what people are looking for now. I see it more and more. They’re not necessarily wanting to see a broad coverage of Premier League football, in the case of the English market, but they really want specific coverage of their own club, and they want to feel like their own club is being given the kind of respect and dedication that reflects their passion.” He noted that the site covering Heart of Midlothian FC, a major team in Scotland but small by wider UK standards with average attendance below 19,000, has 2,500 subscribers
“So I don’t think it just has to be the big clubs,” he said. “I think if you go somewhere where there’s a news desert around a club and are quite focused on which clubs you pick, I think there’s also an opportunity there too.”
McFarlane said an aim for this year will be to build the audience on the sports sites as well as subscriptions, including by building up their Google rankings. “I would say we’re happy with the way the sites have developed. It’s obviously a significant milestone, but no one’s resting on their laurels.
“We know how this industry can change. We know that we have to keep on top of advances in technology and also the style of journalism that our community of readers want, and so we continue to do that in the months and years ahead.”
The Killie Chronicle, covering Kilmarnock FC in Ayrshire, launched last summer on Substack, which McFarlane described as “an amazing platform. There’s so much utility to it, and we wanted to dabble in it a little bit.” He described the brand as “experimental” but said they are “gaining a lot from from the insight that we’re getting from seeing how quickly it grows compared to the other sites and seeing the opportunities that we have on that platform.”
Another Substack launch last year was The Glasgow Wrap, a newsletter primarily curating local news – not just from Newsquest titles – from the area each day. The launch was supported by Michael MacLeod, who runs his own round-ups for Edinburgh and London.
Baird said it is “seeing some quite interesting results… we’re still growing that in the early stages, but we’re reasonably optimistic that there’s enough there”. The Wrap currently has 3,000 combined free and paid subscribers. Those who pay £5 per month get a weekend guide, weekly culture newsletter and an original Sunday long read.
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