Press Gazette is proud to reveal the shortlist for the Future of Media Awards 2026.
The Future of Media Awards, now in their fifth year, celebrate editorial, commercial and product excellence across digital news media in the UK and around the world.
Categories celebrate the best digital storytelling, online video, podcasts, live journalism and newsletters of the past year.
Judges also decided the best websites, apps, publishers and media innovators of the year.
Work is recognised in both national/international and specialist/regional categories to ensure smaller publications are also recognised.
The Future of Media Awards also applaud the best advertising technology, reader revenue strategies and publisher tech partners of the past year.
Entries were eligible if they were published (or work was carried out in the non-editorial categories) in the year to the end of May 2026.
Winners will be revealed at an awards ceremony and dinner on Thursday 10 September at London’s Hilton Bankside, supported by sponsors Admiral and Pugpig.
Individual tickets cost £215 (plus VAT) and tables of ten can be bought for £1,950 (plus VAT).
The awards ceremony will follow the Future of Media Technology Conference which is being held at the same venue during the day.
Find out more about the Future of Media Awards and buy tickets here.
Future of Media Awards 2026 shortlist
Advertising Technology & Commercial Excellence, sponsored by Admiral
The Guardian – Curation at Scale: How The Guardian turned signal loss into a 21% revenue uplift
Facing an industry-wide erosion of third-party identifiers, The Guardian proactively re-engineered its commercial ecosystem to protect the funding of its world-class, independent journalism.
Through a strategic technology partnership with Google Ad Manager, it launched “Curation at Scale,” a privacy-first transformation of its first-party data.
Mediatech – How a Lithuanian digital media house doubled sales through Search-intent segmentation
Mediatech realised the main growth challenge in its wellness division was a lack of awareness that meant “to scale, we had to stop changing the ‘what’ and start expanding the ‘who’…
“We moved from organising our PMax assets by creative angles to structuring them by user motivation and intent.”
The strategy delivered more than a two-fold increase in total sales revenue. “Within PMax alone, conversion value – representing actual purchases – increased 4.2X, while ROAS efficiency grew by 23%.”
App of the Year, sponsored by Pugpig
Belfast Telegraph
New app launched in February 2026 with user experience “built around clarity and discovery”. Video and audio functionality has been greatly improved, homepage updates have been rolled out and there is greater personalisation. “The premium experience offered by the app has helped grow our in-app audience to around 25% of daily pageviews, while almost one-third of paying subscribers now access the app every day.”
The Guardian:
“From June 2025 The Guardian rolled out a relaunched iOS and Android app to increase everyday use, deepen loyalty and support its reader revenue proposition… The redesigned experience centred on a reworked, more visual homepage, enhanced personalisation with a ‘My Guardian’ section, a new audio experience with a dedicated podcast tab and text-to-speech for every article, a richer puzzles hub – each designed to increase frequency, breadth of reading and time spent.”
The i Paper:
App improvements have been guided by audience research resulting in different ways to surface content such as via Shorts videos, Perspectives to allow readers to go deeper, and the ability to follow specific authors. “The i Paper app is where the publication’s relationship with its most loyal readers is deepest. Every product decision is made with those readers in mind – and the engagement data shows they notice.”
Sky News:
“In the last 12 months we have doubled down on our live and premium offering, using design and usability improvements to drive audience growth. The rollout of our hero stream feature has allowed us to stream our channel expertise and big-name guests on the home page of our app in the event of a major breaking news story. Coupled with an increased focus on blogs, this has made real-time coverage a more dynamic and mobile-centric experience.”
The Times:
The Times Live app was relaunched in April 2025 and since then improvements have been revealed every two weeks. These have included: story packages and video/image carousels on the homepage, rebuilding articles natively for faster performance, the addition of a “Quickplay” games category, a new audio tab integrating Times Radio, a relaunched live news template, regional homepages for the US, Ireland and Scotland, and more navigation customisation.
Digital Storytelling (National/International)
Daily Mail Deep Dive: Epstein’s worldwide web
The Economist: The Iran war has entered a new phase
Financial Times: Inside the ‘kill zone’
Financial Times: The dark truth behind supermarket tuna
The Guardian: #ToddlerSkincare: the ‘dark and exploitative’ world of children’s beauty videos on TikTok
Sky News: Whites Only
Digital Storytelling (Specialist/Regional)
Birmingham Live/Mail: Deep Cuts
The Bureau of Investigative Journalism: Why aren’t we listening to Indigenous people about the climate crisis?
MyLondon: Broken Homes
Newsday: Dangerous Roads
The Will Hayward Newsletter: Senedd election
Live Journalism (National/International)
Bloomberg: Markets Today
Daily Mail: Hurricane Melissa
Financial Times: Middle East war
Politico: POLITICO Pub at Party Conferences
Sky News: Birth Experiences: Your Stories
The Times/Times Radio: Afghan data leak
Live Journalism (Specialist/Regional)
Belfast Telegraph: The Open Championship
BirminghamLive: Ozzy Osbourne funeral
Live Science: Artemis II launch
Nottingham Post: Nottingham Inquiry
Reach Visual Journalism Team: 2026 local elections
The Yorkshire Post: Doncaster Sheffield Airport loan
Newsletter (National/International)
The Economist: The Insider
Financial Times: The AI Shift
The i Paper: Politics Unwrapped
The Kyiv Independent: Ukraine Weekly
Politico: London Playbook
Newsletter (Specialist/Regional)
Carbon Brief: DeBriefed
Online Video (National/International)
Daily Mail: ‘This runner WAS GIVEN MY IDENTITY then won Olympic gold!’
The Economist: Visual investigations
Financial Times: Scammers, spies and triads: inside cyber-crime’s $15tn global empire
The Guardian: Along the Green Line
Sky News: Fatal shooting of Alex Pretti
The Times: Why This Guerrilla Army Is Winning Colombia’s Latest War
Online Video (Specialist/Regional)
Cybernews: The Biggest Hacking Mystery of Our Time: Shadow Brokers
Manchester Evening News: Gorton and Denton by-election
Mongabay: Conservation Entangled
Openly: This LGBTQ+ activist is now an ‘extremist’ in Russia
Platts, S&P Global Energy: Shadow Fleet: How illicit shipping networks broke global oil trade
The Will Hayward Newsletter: Three things you need to know before voting in the Senedd election
Podcast (National/International)
BBC Radio 4 + BBC Sounds/Tempo+Talker: Everything Is Fake (And Nobody Cares)
The Guardian: The Birth Keepers
Sky News: Electoral Dysfunction
Sky News/Tortoise Media: The Wargame
The Times and The Sunday Times: The Poppy Day Bomb
The Times and The Sunday Times: The Story
Podcast (Specialist/Regional)
Belfast Telegraph: The BelTel
The Bristol Cable: We’ve Got Your Boy
Clyde 1/Bauer Media: Beware Book
The Currency: Belfry: Ordinary People, Extraordinary Loss
Electrifying.com: Kilowatt Half Hour
Radio Kingston/WKNY: abandoned: The All-American Ruins Podcast
Reader Revenue Strategy
Belfast Telegraph: Turning TikTok into a reader revenue channel
“In September 2025, we launched a Spark Ads campaign, promoting organic Belfast Telegraph TikTok posts as paid ads. This campaign lets us take videos published on the account, give them paid support, and use them to drive users to Premium articles. The ads felt native because they came from the Belfast Telegraph account and were similar to content users were already engaging with.
“We used broad targeting across Northern Ireland and excluded current subscribers to focus spend on potential new readers. The campaign was refreshed with new content every 1-2 weeks, allowing us to respond to the news agenda. Rather than leading with a subscription offer, we led with the journalism itself which showed why a Belfast Telegraph subscription was worth paying for. We used TikTok Smart+ campaigns to optimise performance, which uses automated learning to deliver budget to content most likely to convert.”
Don’t Miss Media Group: Blueprint for making local journalism pay
Don’t Miss Media Group is built on “four distinct revenue streams: sponsored content, business subscriptions, reader subscriptions via Substack, and classified listings through the Noticeboard (digital classifieds) product launched in May 2026… The most telling proof of the model’s strength came at launch of the two newer editions. When Don’t Miss Ramsgate and Don’t Miss Broadstairs launched, readers in both towns immediately asked to upgrade to paid, before any subscription push. That does not happen unless a community already trusts what you are building.”
The Irish News: Building a sustainable reader revenue model
The Irish News carried out an editorial transformation that meant “political exclusives, agenda-setting investigations and unrivalled Gaelic Games coverage were planned with digital audiences in mind from the outset. Live reporting, subscriber-only journalism, newsletters, video, social storytelling and trusted journalist personalities worked together to demonstrate the value of a subscription and convert loyal readers into paying supporters.” The title also invested in “dynamic paywall technology, enhanced registration journeys, first-party data, lifecycle marketing, onboarding, win-back campaigns and continuous optimisation, creating a seamless path from anonymous visitor to long-term subscriber”.
The i Paper: Accelerating subscriber acquisition and diversifying revenue sources
“The i Paper’s revenue strategy over the past year has been built on two foundations: accelerating subscriber acquisition and diversifying our sources of revenue. Neither alone would be sufficient. Together, they reflect a publication that is serious about long-term sustainability.
“On the subscription side, the central shift has been a deliberate change to our customer acquisition approach – introducing a new offer that converts readers to subscribers more effectively and allows us to build engagement and loyalty over time… Subscriber growth has been driven by combination of editorial investment in topic areas that are important to our target audience, as well as making improvements to the product experience.”
The Kyiv Independent: Acquisition, retention, diversified reader contributions strategy
The Kyiv Independent ran two major membership campaigns in 2025 with the slogans “Independent journalism needs a community, not a paywall” and “Independent — under fire, and unstoppable with you on board”, and both met their goals. Geo-targeting experiments showed different countries responded to different messages and the first country-specific campaigns were rolled out in Germany and Sweden. Retention was strengthened with a new website, email onboarding and help centre for members and a new How to Help Ukraine newsletter that raised more than $100,000 for Ukrainian charities. The share of members who also made at least one donation grew and a new crowdfunding platform was built in-house.
Website of the Year (Specialist/B2B)
Over the past year, notable pieces published by Carbon Brief included a factcheck exposing more than 100 false or misleading claims in Donald Trump’s climate science report, and the newsbrand capitalised on its expertise in covering COP summits by launching a limited-time $10 subscription giving access to a dedicated daily newsletter, an invite-only Whatsapp group and members-only webinars.
Electrifying.com has invested in journalism, expanded its editorial team and broadened its EV coverage over the past year. A video player and video news feed have been integrated into the website. Review formats, vehicle data and editorial workflows have been restructured to help content appear in AI answer engines.
Specialist sports publisher Opta Analyst has used data to tell stories no-one else can and brought analysis to life via visual storytelling. Predictions from the Opta supercomputer and the Opta Power Rankings are both widely cited, and league power rankings have now also been introduced.
In the last 12 months the Racing Post delivered standout audience performance, powered by live reporting, festival coverage and live Q&As with its leading columnists. Subscriber views and engagement time grew significantly year-on-year. This was driven by premium editorial series, enhanced behind the scenes access and a new integrated racecards tool that deepened the site’s relationship with every segment of its audience. Landmark investigative work on betting tax, affordability checks and black-market bookmakers has cemented its reputation as the sport’s newspaper of record.
“During 2025, Rail hit a year-on-year growth in web traffic of more than 200%, thanks to great writing, exclusive new stories, brilliant SEO and a 2025 redesign with a new look and better navigation.”
Schools Week and FE Week
In the past year Schools Week and FE Week have been redesigned and rebuilt from the ground up in partnership with the Be the Change Group. New features include text-to-speech on articles, live blogging, native data journalism, early and exclusive access to content for members, fewer adverts, more personalisation, and a modern, curated weekly edition replacing a 15-year-old PDF format.
Website of the Year (Regional/Local)
The Newsquest-owned Andover Advertiser moved back into the heart of its community in 2025. Its renewed focus on local content has helped it nearly double web traffic year on year whilst still producing a paid-for weekly print edition. It launched a subscriber app offering ad-free experience as well as access to a digital version of the print edition. AI is used to help draft news from information shared by local organisations, enabling the title’s reporter to focus on live blogs, investigations, interviews and campaigns.
With nearly 20,000 paying online subscribers the Belfast Telegraph has a focus on stories which drive engagement with its paying online readers and recruit new ones. This has included an exclusive interview with the man falsely accused of murdering 15-week pregnant Natalie McNally. Live coverage highlighted included The Open Golf, Noah Donahoe trial and Ballymena riots. The Mediahuis-owned title also made its 150-year archive available to subscribers, recruited a team of new local patch reporters and has invested in creators producing reporter-led videos.
Reach-owned Birmingham Live has led campaigns against knife crime and calling for tougher sentences for killer motorists. The death of local icon Ozzy Osbourne prompted a digital tribute map, live broadcasts and coverage of moving first-hand accounts. It reported live from the picket lines during the Birmingham bin strikes and its Brumwish campaign saw 14,000 gifts worth £250,000 delivered to the city’s poorest children.
The Chelsea Citizen has had stories followed up by The Sunday Times, Telegraph, Daily Mail, Sun and Private Eye since it launched 18 months ago. It has turned its 1.2 square mile patch from what founder Rob McGibbon termed a “pathetically arid news desert without a local newspaper into an oasis of top-grade local news”. It has exposed a predatory houseboat landlord and secured the backing of rock royalty (Mick Jagger and Eric Clapton) in its successful campaign to stop an eyesore tower block of luxury flats being built by Battersea Bridge.
Kent Online publishes more than 15,000 stories per year serving some 3.5 million website browsers per month. Its subscription strategy has attracted more than 5,000 paying online readers, it tripled its revenue from videos posted to Facebook, and its newsletters reach more than 60,000 readers per day. Scoops have included revealing how a football academy boss took money from parents for an overseas tour which never happened and in-depth coverage of a local meningitis outbreak which led the national news agenda.
Independent local title SoGlos expanded with the launch of a new community section and Lifestyle and Community Awards. These initiatives celebrate charities, volunteers and grassroots initiatives. The site reaches some 1.7 million monthly users with 30,000 registered members. The publisher said: “We believe local journalism should leave people feeling more informed, more connected and more optimistic about the place they live.”
Website of the Year (National/International)
Agenda-setting journalism from Bloomberg UK in the past year has included exclusives on the hidden consequences of Labour’s reforms to the non-dom tax regime, an estimated £11bn in lost savings income that would follow Bank of England rate cuts, Oxford University’s failure of women who reported harassment concerns, an investigation into the relationship between Jeffrey Epstein and Peter Mandelson, and Bloomberg Originals documentary Why Fixing Britain Is So Hard.
The FT has increased production of short-form, news-led and mobile-first videos, many of which play directly on the homepage and app, and launched video product FT Explains. It strengthened its computational journalism capabilities including via proprietary tools built to find exclusives in the Epstein files. Overall the FT published more than 2,000 exclusive stories over the past year, now better showcased via new homepage labels. Ask an Expert Q&As boosted subscriber engagement. FT traffic has reached record highs in the past year, beating the previous period by more than 25% on average every month.
The Guardian executed a major digital overhaul focused on usability, design layout, and technical performance with a new mobile-first website replacing legacy clutter. Editorial highlights included reporting from Gaza, Ukraine and Sudan, interactive formats for local elections and a top 100 novels list, and a major libel trial win against actor Noel Clarke.
The i Paper conducted detailed audience research and testing to understand what its readers and potential readers wanted from a modern news experience and built a product giving them options both for a quick fix (via Shorts) and go deeper. It has a new clean visual identity and new way of curating the homepage to showcase the strongest journalism each day, no matter which section it comes from. Editorial highlights have included a silicosis campaign exposing risks to tradespeople, agenda-setting coverage of the risks to Sir Keir Starmer’s future as prime minister, and an investigation into staff and contractors inadvertently broadcasting their movements on sensitive military installations via Strava.
As it transitions to a premium, video-first newsroom, Sky News has improved its website with a hero stream for its breaking news coverage and content groupings to showcase video and premium features. Editorial highlights have included its on-the-ground Iran war coverage enhanced with data and forensics, phone interviews with Donald Trump, reporting from inside Venezuela in the weeks before Maduro’s capture, and an interactive article about the UK’s maternity crisis.
The Times has shifted to focusing on “fewer, better stories” and established principles around journalism worth subscribing for. Website improvements included more story package presentation options, an immersive World Cup match centre, the introduction of Times Data as a searchable resource of data journalism, a new recipe template, an AI conversational search experience, a homepage video player, regional homepage options for the UK, Ireland and Scotland, and a more accessible puzzles section. The Times has seen four consecutive months of all-time record global audience figures within the last 12 months.
Best Use of AI
BBC World Service: Inside Russia’s new pro-Kremlin vigilantes
The BBC built a multi-agent AI system in which multiple AI programs worked together to do different jobs under direction by a BBC reporter to collect and analyse social media content from Russian nationalist groups.
El Vocero de Puerto Rico: noticIA
“Conceived, designed and built entirely in-house, noticIA is a complete, integrated operating system for journalism, comprising over 170 deployed functions and 30 scheduled automation jobs, that now runs underneath nearly every stage of how we find, report, edit, produce and distribute the news.”
Nikkei: Ask! NIKKEI
“Ask! NIKKEI is an AI assistant built into the foot of every article on Nikkei’s Online Edition. Ask a question and you get an answer in a few seconds, drawn from Nikkei’s own reporting, with footnotes you can click straight through to the source articles… It helps both ends of the readership: a beginner stuck on a term, and an expert who would otherwise open ten articles to chase a single detail.”
Reach: Mantis Scribe
“With a few clicks, Mantis Scribe can rewrite a single story to match the house style and grammar of any of Reach’s 120+ publications, then push it directly to the CMS, along with images and search-optimised headlines. A rapidly-expanding feature set includes a built-in AI agent and an AI-enabled discovery engine, which helps to drive audience growth by producing user-personalised recommendations for future high-performing articles.”
Reuters: Super Summaries
“Launched in July 2025 in partnership with LSEG, the product uses AI to generate structured earnings coverage on companies that Reuters journalists have never had the capacity to cover, with every item reviewed and approved by a Reuters editor before publication.”
The Sun: AI live blogs
“Originally developed to provide comprehensive, high-frequency, end-to-end coverage for all 104 World Cup matches, the platform transforms structured Opta data into The Sun’s distinct tone of voice.”
News Industry Technology Partner
The CounterPress platform “empowers journalists and creators to conceive, design, promote, monetise and sustain their own niche and regional titles, providing the technical infrastructure and strategic consultancy required to complement the outlet owners’ storytelling skills. Formed in 2024, CounterPress has grown from one to nearly 50 networked outlets during the 2025/26 period.”
“Powering real-time monetisation decisions across more than 500 news sites, Sophi by Mather combines publisher-native AI with strategic and implementation support to help news organizations grow digital revenue, strengthen first-party data, and protect the value of their content. Its technology includes the Sophi Dynamic Paywall Engines and Sophi Paywall, powered by MonetizationOS, enabling access control, entitlement management, and monetization across human and machine traffic.”
“Used by more than 450 newsrooms worldwide, Tickaroo enables publishers to transform breaking news, sport, politics, elections and live events into highly engaging audience experiences while streamlining editorial workflows and unlocking new commercial opportunities.
“Between June 2025 and May 2026 alone, publishers created over 25,000 live blogs using Tickaroo. More than 18,600 of those generated significant audience engagement, with audiences clocking up over 7.3 million interactions on Tickaroo-powered coverage.”
Publisher of the Year
The Daily Beast
The Daily Beast reported an annual profit for the first time in its 17-year history in 2025 and has now made subscriptions a “core growth engine” across its own website, Substack and Youtube.
DMG New Media
DMG New Media has developed specialist vertical brands, platform-native formats and creator-led storytelling that reach more than 50 million followers with more than 1.5 billion monthly video views across Instagram and Tiktok alone, as well as bring in new forms of advertising revenue.
The Economist
The Economist launched premium video product Insider with a new bespoke set and studio gallery and app-first experience. Its five shows aim to make sense of an increasingly volatile world and are backed by a newsletter that invites subscriber interactions.
The i Paper/Harmsworth Media
The i Paper rebuilt its editorial strategy around what audiences most wanted, focusing on opinion and insight and new formats like Perspectives (a distinctive layout for expert voices) and Shorts videos.
Politico/Axel Springer
This year Politico has expanded its live journalism with the POLITICO Pub at the UK party conferences and Munich Security Conference, continues to influence people shaping politics and policy via Playbook and is gearing up to expand into Madrid and Canberra.
SoPublishing
This year flagship media brand SoGlos has been strengthened editorially through the launch of a dedicated Community section and the Lifestyle & Community Awards, and investment in lifestyle and business journalism. SoPublishing has also continued developing proprietary tech SoCMS and it marked its nineteenth consecutive year of profitability anchored on trusted editorial, first-party audience relationships and long-term partnerships.
Times Media/News UK
During the past year Times Media has aligned the newsroom and its wider business on daily habit as the North Star goal, rolled out a “fewer, better stories” approach for journalism worth subscribing for, introduced bonus family and friend accounts, updated the app every two weeks, and diversified revenues including by launching travel agency Times Holidays.
Media Innovator of the Year
Alfredo Triviño: ABC
Triviño led a reimagining of ABC, Spain’s 123-year-old newspaper of record, with a new mobile-first product ecosystem and a content model based on three pillars: live news and experiences, exclusive stories, and shows.
Harry Lewis-Irlam: Daily Mail
As director of visual storytelling, Lewis-Irlam has transformed how graphics can appear in the Daily Mail in print and online and masterminded its flagship digital storytelling brand Deep Dive.
Kate Day: Politico
As senior executive editor for Europe, Day has been central to Politico’s growth in the UK and now its launch in Spain.
Nick Moar: DMG New Media
Moar built and now leads the 100-strong social-first division at the publisher of the Daily Mail aged 23.
Email pged@pressgazette.co.uk to point out mistakes, provide story tips or send in a letter for publication on our "Letters Page" blog
