Out of Office

Welcome to Episode 14 of the Out of Office podcast, recorded in January 2024 with Karl Wells as we walked along the West Side Highway in Manhattan towards Chelsea Piers. Karl and I were colleagues many years ago at News UK before he headed over to New York to work at the Wall Street Journal. He spent a number of years there heading up subscriptions before joining The Information a couple of years ago. At the time of recording, he’s just a couple of weeks away from joining The Washington Post as Chief Growth Officer - he’s certainly doing something right!We spoke about his time both at The Journal & The Information, subscription strategies in general, and what he thinks about 2024 and what it’s going to bring to news media. It’s definitely worth a listen if you’re focusing on reader revenue right now - Karl’s got a lot of information to share. I’d definitely recommend listening - I hope you enjoy it! As always, give me a shout if you have any suggestions on who you’d like me to chat with or any feedback at all. It’d be great to hear from you.Jonny

Welcome to episode 13 of the Out of Office podcast.In this episode I take a stroll around Central Park with Ariscielle Novicio, a News Corp colleague of mine from many years ago and now CTO at New York Post. We reminisce about two sister projects we worked on back in 2010 that were both designed to change the face of news media. While mine didn't see the light of day, Ariscielle's, The Daily, did make it, and for some time as a very high production newspaper for the iPad. We talk quite a lot about those projects, how they were pulled together, and what ultimately ended them. We also had a completely unplanned and highly coincidental bump in with Paul Mellor, who used to be CTO at the Wall Street Journal. So bizarrely, we had the New York Post, the Journal, and the Times of London together at the same time, in the same park. No idea how that happened, but that was quite fun! It's a really interesting chat with Ariscielle and we covered all sorts of different topics, from her experience running technology at one of the biggest newspapers in the US to back in the times we were doing crazy stuff on the iPad, and a whole lot of other things. It's definitely worth a listen, so do give it a go.I hope you enjoy it and as always, give me a shout if you have any suggestions on who you’d like me to chat with or any feedback at all. It’d be great to hear from you.

Welcome to episode 12 of the Out of Office podcast.In this episode I chat with Kerin O’Connor, publisher and subsequent CEO of The Week - an amazing business that’s very close to our hearts here at Pugpig as our first ever app we launched together with Kerin and his team back in 2011. We walked around Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens and talked about Kerin’s time at Dennis Publishing, how they built an incredibly successful brand and subscription business at The Week, and more recently one of the fastest growing news brands ever with The Week Junior.A little over a year ago, Kerin set up his own business called Atlas - a consultancy specialising in subscription businesses. So we spent a bit of time speaking about the sort of work Kerin’s doing right now and subscription businesses in general. Lots to get stuck into in this episode...I hope you enjoy it and as always, give me a shout if you have any suggestions on who you’d like me to chat with or any feedback at all. It’d be great to hear from you.

Welcome to Episode 11 of the Out of Office podcast, which I recorded in the summer of 2021 with Alan Hunter, former head of digital for The Times and The Sunday Times, where we walked around Alexandra Palace and talked about Alan’s days at News UK - his shift from journalist to digital guru, how print and digital have converged over recent years and how to build a world class digital news media team. We also had a quick chat about something that comes up time and time again - which is the better model for digital news media, periodical editions or continuous feeds - or possibly even something in-between? Listen in and you’ll get Alan’s views and some insight into how they’ve approached this at the Times.Thanks again to Alan for being so generous with his time, and as always, if you have any suggestions on who you’d like me to walk and talk with, or if you have any feedback at all - just give me a shout - I’d love to hear from you…

Welcome to Episode 10 of the Out of Office podcast, which I recorded with Matt Kelly, the founder of The New European, and which is the second of two bite sized chunks.In this first part (episode 9), we talked about Matt’s earlier days as a regional newspaper journalist, his views on the news media in general, his time at Archant, and the birth of The New European.In this second part, he takes us through how he secured the investment to buy his creation, The New European from Archant and how he’s new building the business pretty much from scratch (also with a little help from Team Pugpig of course!)It was a really interesting chat as we walked through Highbury Fields, on a typically British summer’s day, alternating from beautiful sunshine to torrential rainstorm from one minute to the next...

Welcome to Episode 9 of the Out of Office podcast, which I recorded with Matt Kelly, the founder of The New European, and which I've split into two bite sized chunks.In this first part, we talk about Matt’s earlier days as a regional newspaper journalist, his views on the news media in general, his time at Archant, and the birth of The New European.In the second part (episode 10), he takes us through how he secured the investment to buy his creation, The New European from Archant and how he’s new building the business pretty much from scratch (also with a little help from Team Pugpig of course!)It was a really interesting chat as we walked through Highbury Fields, on a typically British summer’s day, alternating from beautiful sunshine to torrential rainstorm from one minute to the next...