Henry Faure Walker is CEO of Newsquest Media Group, the UK’s second largest local news group (after Reach Plc), with a portfolio of more than 250 local news brands (including 27 dailies) and magazines online and in print. It claims an online audience of 41mn monthly users and 7mn weekly print readers. Its 334-year-old Berrow’s Worcester Journal is said to be the world’s oldest continuously published newspaper.
The company, which was formed from the merger of newspaper publishers formerly owned by Reed Elsevier and Pearson, was acquired by Gannett, of the US, for £922mn (11x EBITDA) in 1999, at the dawn of the internet. In 2022, Newsquest acquired Archant, publisher of newpapers and magazines in the east of England. While it has a legacy pension fund deficit, Newsquest has consistently been one of the UK’s most successful local news groups. In 2022, it had £30mn EBITDA, revenue of £150mn and a 20% margin.
Faure Walker was appointed 10 years ago after 12 years at the former Johnston Press local news group (since acquired by National World Plc) where he became a digital specialist. He had graduated from Durham University in English literature and has an MBA from Insead. He is currently chair of the UK News Media Association.

What was your first job and how did it guide your future career?
My first (temporary) job was plucking turkeys on a poultry farm in the east of England during the Christmas holidays. The turkeys would be ‘dispatched’ in one corner of the warehouse then hung upside down on a conveyor belt where I was one of five pluckers. Once you had plucked a bird, the foreman gave you a different colour raffle ticket according to the bird’s weight and, at the end of the day, you cashed in your raffle tickets at a hatch in the side of the farmhouse. Because I was slow at plucking, I earned a pittance. I didn’t return the following year! After university, I wrote to a number of different media companies offering to work for free, to gain experience. Fortunately, a marketing comms company called The Communication Group responded. After a few weeks of unpaid work, they offered me a permanent job. I really threw myself into it and, because it was quite a small company, I got lots of exposure to interesting businesses and clients.
How did you come to join Johnston Press?
In 2001, I took a career break to do an MBA at INSEAD, in France. Among other things, it gave me the insights and confidence not to be intimidated by others in business. When I came back into the workforce in 2002, the dotcom boom of the late 1990s had burst, but it was obvious to most that it was only a temporary pause and that the internet was going to have a hugely transformational impact on media. I was particularly interested in working with established media companies who needed to navigate the disrupion and reinvent their business model. So I alighted on regional media and was lucky enough to be offered a job working for Tim Bowdler, the then CEO of Johnston Press plc, which was the UK’s largest local newspaper company at the time. It had been buying up a lot of local newspaper companies and had just completed its largest acquisition buying Regional Independent Media, owner of the likes of The Yorkshire Post, for £560mn – and they were looking for an MBA-type to help with the integration.
How different was the business then?
Well, first and foremost, the news publishing industry was much larger. Newspaper companies were big business and classified advertising (‘the rivers of gold’ as Rupert Murdoch had once described them) was still very much in print, high yielding and had not yet migrated online. In fact, remarkably, Johnston Press was only just outside the ranks of the 100 largest listed companies in the UK. Culturally, it was a still a pretty traditional company. They definitely needed a lot of help embracing digital.
What were the milestones?
I started off as assistant to the CEO, shadowing him in many of his meetings, checking out opportunities for him and the leadership team. I then started up a Corporate Ventures division which was an effort to start diversifying the company’s interests away from newspapers. We made some niche acquisitions, but it never had the full support of the board who were much more interested in chomping up yet more newspaper companies on what were becoming very high valuations. In 2005, Johnston Press acquired The Scotsman Publications from the Barclay brothers (who had just acquired the Daily Telegraph) and, in 2006, I was appointed general manager. That was tremendous hands-on operational experience for me – the business needed a lot of restructuring and I learned a lot. In 2010, I was appointed as the Digital Director for the whole of Johnston Press with a brief to inject more pace into their digital transformation.
What is the scope and scale of Newsquest?
Newsquest is the largest local-only news publisher in the UK. It’s owned by Gannett, the largest news publisher in the US, listed on the NYSE. But we run the business pretty autonomously in the UK. Despite our large scale, we have always tried to hold true to our belief that the core value of the business is local. Even though the temptation to centralise can be great (big central content hubs, central sales centres etc.), in our view you must have strong local leadership and sufficient ‘boots on the ground’ in local markets. So, while it’s important to drive best practice, economies of scale, digital transformation throughout the organisation, you must balance this with the need to empower local teams and individual local strategies.
What have been the highlights of your first 10 years as CEO?
I see my job principally as being the guardian of delivering a sustainable and successful business model so that our 200 local brands can carry on doing their hugely important work in communities up and down the country for many years to come. Business transformation should be a never-ending process. We still have a lot to do, but the Newsquest business is in a good place.
In 2022 our revenues were up 3%, last year revenues were down 3% – excluding acquisitions – so flat over two years, despite the challenges in the economy and the wider ad market.
Our digital reach and engagement continues to grow. January will be another record month with over 50mn visitors to our sites. Most important, our engagement is high and continues to grow. Take a typical local market, such as the city of York, where we publish the York Press: online we reach over 75% of the population, and 25% come to our website almost every day.
As you’d expect, we’ve done a lot of very effective work on the cost base, streamlining workflows, improving productivity. On the ad sales, we’ve worked really hard to transform our local sales teams from sellers of print space (10 years ago) to being skilled local digital advertising consultants (now) that help local businesses on a wide range of digital advertising solutions. That’s been a key driver in getting Newsquest’s digital advertising to a place where it is now more than 50% of our total ad revenue
What’s your vision for Newsquest in, say, five years?
I am positive about the future of local news and our ability to continue to publish successful local news brands in all of the communities we do today. Clearly, print audiences will continue to decline. There will be further shifts towards online reader revenue strategies and digital subscriptions, but local advertising will still be the largest component of the Newsquest model in five years. With the demise of the cookie, local news sites’ inherent geo targeting can give them an advantage. News brands also provide a much better quality advertising environment than the often toxic alternative of social media. We only started rolling out digital subs three years ago, but we now have 84,000 paying digital subscribers, growing at a rate of about 35% per annum. We see a lot of growth opportunities in digital community newsletters. Building more diverse revenue streams will be important: we like B2B regional events, for example.
Which companies do you most admire?
I am a big fan of Schibsted (the Scandinavian media company). They have demonstrated that, if you want to compete successfully in the digital space, you must be aggressive and be prepared to disrupt your own legacy business – and they went on to build a phenomenal global digital classifieds powerhouse.
What are the best lessons you have learned?
Business transformations will fail unless you can successfully articulate to your employees what’s specifically in it for them and why it’s good for them as individuals to embrace the change. In this context, you might think you’re communicating a lot, but you really can never communicate too much.