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September 22, 2026

Computer Weekly bucks trend of tech journalism decline by growing editorial team

Business model combines high-quality editorial with selling access to reader data.

By Alice Brooker

Computer Weekly, which claims to be the world’s first technology newspaper, has increased its full-time editorial team by two-thirds in ten years.

The growth comes as technology journalism faces widespread cutbacks. In 2025, layoffs hit tech news and reviews site CNET and Techcrunch, while Computer Weekly’s own parent company Informa Techtarget also made cuts and technology newsbrand Digital Frontier closed. In June 2026, fintech giant Robin Hood also cut several tech reporters at its media arm Sherwood News before shutting the outlet altogether.

Computer Weekly’s business model does not rely on programmatic advertising or paid subscriptions, but it instead generates revenue by providing technology vendors with audience intelligence and lead-generation services to help them identify potential customers.

The title has changed owners since Press Gazette spoke to editor Bryan Glick in 2016 to mark its 50th anniversary and grown its team from 18 to 30 full-time journalists.

In 2024, Computer Weekly’s parent Techtarget merged with Informa’s technology business, creating Informa Techtarget – with Informa taking a 57% controlling stake of the company.

Computer Weekly today attracts around 300,000 website visits per month (according to Similarweb) and claims to have 55,000 weekly digital magazine subscribers in the UK. Glick said the title has 270,000 registered users including those signed up to receive its six newsletters.

Glick credits the title’s longevity to the closure of its weekly print title in 2011, its focus on investigative reporting and ability to retain its core audience while also appealing to more mainstream readers.  

While Computer Weekly does not share its financials, Informa Techtarget’s latest figures show that revenue in the B2D (Brand to Demand), segment, which includes Computer Weekly, grew by 1.2% year on year in the six months to 30 June 2026.

Post-print business less ad-reliant

Glick said the profession that Computer Weekly serves is “massively bigger” than it was in its early days.

“We’ve grown over that time to become an international global publication serving not just people who work in IT these days, but anybody in business who has an interest in technology,” he said. “So we’re not just read by IT experts now. We’re read by business leaders and business executives.”

In 2011, Computer Weekly ended its print edition and became digital-only in response to a decline in print advertising. Print job advertising had once been its main source of income.

“I’m pleased to be able to say that the decision to go [digital] early absolutely paid off… Going digital wasn’t just a question of going from selling adverts on paper to selling adverts on a website… we took a much more data-led route rather than advertising, and that’s been fantastically important for us.”

The more data-led business model has meant Computer Weekly is less reliant on advertising with most revenue coming from providing data to technology companies.

Before the merger with Informa, Glick said “display advertising revenue was barely 15% of our revenue” and today is a “a much smaller part of our overall revenue mix than it used to be”.

All Computer Weekly’s content is free to access for registered readers as are its two annual events.

Post Office scandal ‘improved the quality of our journalism’

One major turning point for Computer Weekly was its reporting on the Post Office scandal, for which Glick was awarded a British Journalism Award for Campaign of the Year in 2024.

The award recognised the publisher’s 15-year coverage of the wrongful convictions of hundreds of Post Office subpostmasters, who were accused of theft and fraud over issues in fact caused by faulty accounting software.

The site saw “an enormous spike in traffic” when the ITV drama Mr Bates Versus The Post Office aired in January 2024.

The Post Office scandal “elevated the people’s perceptions of our journalism and improved the quality of our journalism”, said Glick, but “without the Post Office, we had a pretty strong reputation for solid investigations around technology topics”.

He pointed to the title’s coverage of the 1994 Mull of Kintyre Chinook crash, which helped highlight evidence of problems with the helicopter’s software.

Competing to surface in AI

Glick said Computer Weekly has seen referral traffic from Google decline by around 20% as a result of AI Overviews and algorithm changes.

“We realise we have to engage our audience directly with content that gives them a reason to want to keep coming back to us,” said Glick, adding that the brand is now competing to surface in AI search rather than just Google search.

“If [users] want to find out more about it, and they want to have the understand the depth and the context, and what it means to them as somebody with an interest in IT, then they’ll come to Computer Weekly for it. So, we’re still news-driven, but depth and context and analysis is getting ever more important as a way of differentiating what we do.”

The title is putting “extra focus” on newsletters and social media to strengthen engagement with its core audience.

Computer Weekly encourages its team to use AI, using Informa’s internal AI tool Elysia, to support research and data journalism, but avoids it for content creation.

“We really think that original journalism is what’s at the heart of our success financially and editorially, and going forward what will continue to differentiate us from a lot of the AI-generated content that our readers are being sent every day,” said Glick.

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