Nursing and healthcare title Nursing Times is closing its print edition after more than 120 years.
“It’s a moment in history, isn’t it?” editor Steve Ford told Press Gazette, as he added that the publisher is already “doing so much moving forward on the digital front”.
Nursing Times printed its first weekly edition in May 1905, serving nurses and healthcare professionals with industry insights and news. It has been monthly since 2017.
Today, its role is “almost to champion nursing, because we’ve been around for so long,” said Ford, adding it reports on both achievements of the industry as well as failures of regulators and the NHS.
The November edition of the print magazine will be its last.
The title, with 20,000 overall subscribers, currently has around 100 print-only subscribers. Some 11,900 receive print and digital, while the remainder are digital only.
Nursing Times also has digital-only subscription packages in place with hospitals and GP practices.
Ford claimed the magazine brand, which is part of Metropolis-owned Emap, has “never not made a profit”.
Digital devices once ‘frowned upon’ in healthcare
Ford said that when Nursing Times and ten other titles were sold to Metropolis in 2017 it was “already kind of in the process of moving things online”.
Referring to Nursing Times’s competitors, he added: “Health Service Journal [and] GP magazine, they have gone digital already. So it’s kind of been on the cards for a long time.”
As a journal and magazine, the publisher aimed to “continue doing print for as long as possible”, said Ford, especially since health professionals “like having a journal to put on the bookshelf” and “keep it as a volume of academic” material.
“I suppose five years ago, but certainly longer, using digital devices in healthcare settings was frowned upon quite a lot,” Ford added, “whereas now people are using these tools… every day, and it’s not frowned upon at all.”
Nursing Times had 127,481 monthly visits worldwide in October, according to Similarweb. In 2024, it was averaging 291,289 UK-based users per month according to the publisher’s own data.
Ford said “a lot” of the brand’s traffic comes via Facebook.
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New digital features receiving investment
The magazine has developed several new digital features in recent years, which Ford said “require a bit of investment” once the print edition closes.
These include its website Journal of Nursing Leadership (JNL), chatbot Ask Nursing Times, AI-powered data suite Nursing Insights, which allows nurses to compare trusts, and its Continuing Professional Development (CPD) units, which are online learning tools.
JNL and Nursing Insights were both launched this year.
Yet to launch are an app and an event based around “influencers in the profession”.
Ask Nursing Times was launched in February 2024 and “searches the entire Nursing Times website and gives you the answer based on all of our articles”, said Ford. It has received more than 200,000 questions and was developed by Miso Technologies.
“The digital story is very positive, basically we’re trying a lot of things,” said Ford. “We’re putting money into all of that.”
Nursing Times to increase exclusive investigations
No redundancies have yet been made as a result of the print magazine closing, with resources planned to move to digital instead and JNL in particular.
Nursing Times has an eight-strong full-time editorial team, plus two part-timers. Half of the team are clinical editors, and the other half news reporters and production staff.
Ford said the brand is aiming to focus on obtaining “more exclusive investigation content”.
Ford added the title is “constantly trying to introduce new tools” to the website, “so that we keep our subscription base stable, and then hopefully start to significantly grow it again”.
Nursing Times magazine sold for £12.99 per print copy during its most recent distribution.
Nursing Times now offers a “basic digital” subscription package, not including Nursing Insights, for £62 for one year.
Its “premium digital” package, including Nursing Insights, is priced from £247 a year. Access to only Nursing Insights costs from £147 a year.
It has an “archive only” offering, excluding both new Nursing Times online content and Nursing Insights, that costs £30 per quarter.
Nursing Times is owned by Metropolis International which runs more than 40 specialist and B2B titles.
Metropolis International Group reported turnover of £13m in 2024 (down from £13.3m) and profit (EBITDA) of £905,000 (down from £1.2m in 2023).
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