Paid digital subscriptions at UK regional publishing giant Newsquest have risen from 100,000 to 135,000 in the past year.
Article page views across the second biggest regional media group in the UK reached 208 million in August, up 11% year on year, and the publisher also reported 61 million unique visitors in the month.
“Two per cent of that 61 million – 1.3 million users – generate about 30% of our editorial page views,” Newsquest chief executive Henry Faure Walker told Press Gazette. “So you’ve got a very important loyal audience.”
The company classifies a loyal reader as one that visits the site at least 15 times a month.
Faure Walker said the company is seeing success through engaging audience with stories grounded in “local context”, assessing audience analytics, and offering puzzles and rewards through its subscription package.
He also said that while Newsquest newsrooms are using AI, including via its team of around 40 AI-assisted reporters, the company does not appear to be impacted so far by the rollout of Google AI Overviews.
The Oxford Mail, one of Newsquest’s 200 titles, achieved 11.4 million article page views – up by more than 100% year on year, Faure Walker said.
“They have a very strong news team there, particularly adept and skilled at digital journalism,” said Faure Walker. “The next biggest site is the Eastern Daily Press, that was up 20%, with 10.2 million article page views.”
Asked how Newsquest keeps article views and subscriber count increasing, Faure Walker said: “We have a strong ethos at Newsquest to make sure that we don’t fall in the trap of too much [SEO] trending news, which possibly some other publishers do. Our local sites now typically reach more than 75% of [communities served by the newspapers] each month.”
Loyal readers like football, crime, court and local news
“Subscriber growth has come in recent weeks from good football club [content],” Faure Walker said. “Not necessarily in big clubs like Liverpool or Manchester – that’s Reach PLC territory. Sports news in Ipswich-based sites is covered by East Anglican Daily Times, so we’ve leaned into that quite well.”
He added the titles capture a “local and engaged audience” by avoiding writing stories like “about celebrities who had nothing to do with Oxfordshire”.
“Quite a lot of work” has also been carried out in the newsroom over the last 12 to 18 months assessing analytics and data of “loyal visitors”. “Common loyalty themes” were found among readers – such as stories about local planning or local going-out recommendations.
“Audiences also like local crime and court stories, so we’ve been doing that which is paying dividends in terms of page views we’re getting from an audience,” Faure Walker added.
“Our subscriber growth shows people love local news, and that is underappreciated. We’re publishing a product that is definitely not going out of fashion.”
E-edition is key perk of Newsquest subscriptions
Newsquest launched its paywall five years ago, and today offers a soft paywall on 60% of its local news sites. Online visitors can typically read up to 30 articles a month before they pay, “although a small number of articles are subscriber-only content,” said Faure Walker.
Of the 200 Newsquest titles (160 of which are in print), 80 of these have a digital subscription offering: “We may grow that, but very small titles are still entirely free access.”
A digital subscription is typically priced at £4.99 per month, and includes access to all the site’s content in an ad-light environment as well as an e-edition of the print paper, puzzles and reader rewards, such as discounts on selected brands.
“We find that a lot of our digital subscribers enjoy the e-edition as much as they do the full access,” Faure Walker said, adding the popularity of the e-edition is due to seeing a more zoomed-out layout.
“Most people read online news on mobile, that’s quite a narrow reading experience, and you’re physically just really being presented with one article.”
He added not all of the subscription packages offer puzzles and rewards, but “it’s an area we’re looking to grow. If they don’t currently, they will in the future.”
Looking at how the paywall is developing over time, Faure Walker said Newsquest “might increase the number of articles which are premium content, so you’d have to pay regardless of how many articles you read”.
Driving subscriptions through bundled access in Scotland
Three months ago titles at Newsquest Scotland (including The Herald and The National) rolled out a bundle offer, giving users the ability to subscribe to a group of sites.
“Because we own a number of quite a lot of other local titles in addition to the Herald, this is quite popular – geographically it makes sense. We’ve got a quite compelling regional news package.”
Newsquest doesn’t have any other bundled packages available at present. Faure Walker said offering bundles “makes sense where you’ve got a regional cluster of titles, but I wouldn’t overplay that as a priority strategy”.
“There’s unlikely great interest for someone who lives in Somerset to also subscribe to a news brand in the North East of England,” he said.
To drive subscriptions, Newsquest offers an ad-free experience with free apps (“we could always do more to reduce advertising clutter”) for its titles, and “deliberately” prices its subscriptions low.
Newsquest ‘bucking trend’ on revenue
“Newsquest continues to buck the trend in terms of its revenue performance,” said Faure Walker, adding the company is continuing to “outperform the industry in terms of advertising revenues and total revenues”.
Newsquest’s total adjusted EBITDA profits reached £11m in the three months to 30 June 2025 (according to figures originally in US dollars filed by parent company Gannett), an increase of 5.35% year on year.
In 2023, Newsquest reported revenue of £192m and profit (EBITDA) of £41.3m.
“We’re having a reasonable year – it’s a bit softer than last year but it’s okay,” Faure Walker said. “It’s sort of treading water. And the advertising market, which local publishers like us are very dependent on, is correlated with the strength of the economy.”
More than a third (35%) of Newsquest’s revenue stream is made up of digital (30% advertising and 5% digital subscriptions), about 30% comes from print advertising and about 30% from print circulation. The remaining revenue, just under 5%, comes from events and other sources.
According to Gannett, Newsquest’s average revenue per user increased by 1% year on year in the three months to 30 June 2025, from £4.42 to £4.47.
A “very important part” of Newsquest’s strategy is its digital marketing service Local IQ, said Faure Walker, particularly selling SEO marketing services to small and medium-sized businesses. The service accounts for about 5% of total Newsquest revenues.
“Particularly with the introduction of AI Mode, businesses are asking for help with appearing as results at the top of the search,” Faure Walker said. “E-commerce and online is so important to every business now.
“What we’re doing with Local IQ is broadening out the range of digital marketing services we can offer in addition to just advertising on the local news brand site. One of the most important areas of our business is SEO advice and selling SEO consultancy to businesses.”
AI writing tool ‘frees journalists’ time’
Newsquest rolled out its own AI tool – Copywriting Assisted Service (CWAS) – in most of its newsrooms nine months ago to provide drafts of some stories and also sub-edit.
“It frees up journalists’ time from copy admin tasks to higher impact journalism: doing interviews and getting out to see the interview subject,” said Faure Walker.
[Read more: Impartial Reporter stems print decline and grows digital sales as it turns 200]
He stressed use of the tool “always has a human journalist in the loop”.
“We have about 750 journalists, and only about 30 are trained to use it. We have strong guidelines around using it.”
Newsquest is also embedding more AI tools into its CMS over time, to “reduce the time of administering an article”.
“But we have some anxiety about what the future holds for news publisher traffic in terms of [Google] AI Mode at the moment,” Faure Walker said.
“National publishers are being affected. I wouldn’t want to be overly confident in this, but it might be that local news publishers are a bit better insulated because the nature of our content is very hyperlocal, which is unlikely to be subject to AI Mode search.”
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