As pressures on traffic and discovery grow, coupled with the bombardment of AI ‘slop’, there is an opportunity for publishers to lean into a true ‘quality over quantity’ ethos and reap the benefits. But what does this look like in practice?
At The Publisher Summit, in London, MediaVoices was joined by Maire Bonheim, Head of Newsletters at The Telegraph, Malcolm Coles, Audience Growth Director, at Hearst UK, and Anna Sbuttoni, Deputy Head of Digital at The Times and Sunday Times on a panel moderated by Press Gazette’s Charlotte Tobitt.
The panel shared how actively embracing publishing fewer but higher-quality articles and newsletters has had a measurable impact on audience growth, conversion, and subscriber retention. You can listen to the full session below, or by searching for ‘The Publisher Podcast’ wherever you find podcasts.
‘Fewer, better stories’ at The Times
British daily newspaper publisher The Times and Sunday Times has a strong digital presence, with 84% of subscribers reading online-only, according to Deputy Head of Digital Anna Sbuttoni. In 2024, the brand had a full content audit of stories, looking at what people were and weren’t reading.
“We realised that a quarter of the stories we were publishing across the whole site had under 2,000 subscribers or guest visitors,” Sbuttoni told The Publisher Summit audience. The audience team spent a lot of time questioning what was being published, what was working and what wasn’t, including research with a reader panel of 12,000 Times subscribers alongside a broader survey.
This formed the backbone of a new ‘fewer, better stories’ strategy, which came into force in late 2025. The news desk were publishing over 200 stories, which has now been cut to 160. The majority of stories cut were ones Sbuttoni described as ‘one-fact’ stories, incremental updates, and stories that could be found anywhere else.
To help the journalists see the outcomes of this strategy, they built a tracker to visualise the results. This is now the Times Editorial Datum (TED) which has iterated through various versions, and now shows story count, page views and engagement data like subscriber engaged minutes. Sbuttoni described that they’ve also introduced a ‘Quality Read Score’ – the percentage of subscribers who made it at least halfway through an article. This is an important reality check for editors about how much people are really reading, given that 70% of subscriber reading takes place in the app on mobile devices.
“We were able to track week to week as we were publishing fewer stories, that those stories were actually making more impact, and our page views were going up,” she explained, noting the rapid positive improvement for traffic and engagement.
The story cuts and the impact of them has been felt differently across various desks. Sbuttoni highlighted the sports desk, which ended up cutting around 30% of the number of stories they produce – one of the highest proportions. But their traffic is now up “nearly 50% year on year.”
The Times has now had four consecutive months of “all-time record traffic growth”. But Sbuttoni was keen to emphasise that the conversation in the newsroom has moved away from traffic. Daily habit is now the ‘North Star’, with journalists more interested in engagement data than hits.
“All of this focus on the numbers was really just the mechanism to talk about quality: what reaches the bar that we should expect from The Times, and what’s really worth paying for?” Sbuttoni outlined.
She highlighted one example of an article produced by Environment Editor Adam Vaughan about how Britain quit coal for electricity generation. The piece was very visual, with archive clips, imagery and in-depth reporting, and turned into the most-read story of the day.
Vaughan messaged Sbuttoni later to say that without the ‘fewer, better stories’ approach, he’d have published a one-fact story about the end of coal day. But the new mindset had resulted in a top-performing piece.
“It really changed the mindset in the newsroom. Reporters are really thinking, what should I invest my time in?,” Sbuttoni concluded. “Do I need to file every turn of a story, or can I actually step back and bring something that’s much more high value?”
Showing what works at Hearst
Like The Times, consumer media company Hearst UK also underwent a content review in order to give their editors a chance to concentrate on more successful articles. They too needed solid data in order to formulate a successful strategy. “We found it very hard to get data on what was working and what wasn’t, because we never really understood why an article was being written,” Audience Growth Director Malcolm Coles told The Publisher Summit.
Coles shared that they had a minimum target of 1,000 page views. But depending on the brand, anything from 20% to 70% of articles didn’t meet that threshold.
He started off with a giant spreadsheet, where journalists and editors had to explain the reasons for publishing something. “If you want to pitch an article at the daily conference, you have to write your suggested headline in the spreadsheet, why you’re publishing it, and where you think it’s going to get traffic – SEO, Discover, social, whatever,” Coles explained.
“The discipline of doing that, and the fact that we could get much better data about why we were doing articles and where they were expected to do traffic…meant that we had much better data.”
This wasn’t designed to be a burden on writers, but instead to identify where the audience team could help. Coles highlighted cases where someone thought they were writing for SEO but actually getting Discover traffic, in which case headline writing should be approached very differently. It also gave editors visibility over what proportion of content was being written for traffic versus membership or newsletters.
The spreadsheet has now gone through several evolutions. It now has around 8 columns a journalist needs to fill in to get something published. “It doesn’t actually take very long, despite the horrendous-sounding nature of it, but it means we can present back to them much better data on what works and what doesn’t,” Coles smiled. “Traffic went up and the number of articles went down, so, success!”
Alongside the spreadsheet, the audience team changed when they sent the daily statistics report. Moving it from late morning to 9am is a simple change, but Coles noted it meant the teams had it in time for the daily editorial stand-up, so people could discuss what had gone well the day before to inform that day.
Coles has also been experimenting with AI to analyse headlines and offer suggestions for improvement. “We were able to show that ‘withholding’ headlines had lower engagement time because people would click through then click off again,” he said, noting that this defied conventional wisdom. “But if you were much clearer in your headline about what the interesting thing about your story was, people would spend more time with what you’d created.”
Across Hearst UK’s brands, traffic is now up 100% year on year. Coles noted that the number of web articles has gone down, but they have found better ways of using a journalist’s time, such as writing member newsletters, so actual output is similar. They have also been rewarded with strong newsletter growth.
“By doing less, what we’re doing is more effective, and that means we’ve freed up time to do other important things – communicating with members, member-only newsletters – and everyone’s happier,” Coles explained, emphasising the membership focus of Hearst. “People can see that the work they’re doing has a much greater impact.”
Crucially though, the spreadsheets and monitoring is not designed to eradicate editorial instinct, but rather provide pointers and guidance. Coles gave an example of a Good Housekeeping story titled ‘What? I can’t have porridge for breakfast?’ which broke all the guidelines about writing for Google Discover, but reached over 8 million people.
“We’re not trying to drive creativity out,” he emphasised. “We’re just trying to put some guardrails in and go, if you do this sort of thing, it tends to be [more or less] successful.”
Honing Telegraph’s newsletters
The Telegraph, a British broadsheet newspaper, was the final publication featured on the panel. Like The Times and Hearst UK, The Telegraph underwent a similar focus on quality, but specifically applied to their newsletter portfolio.
Maire Bonheim, The Telegraph’s Head of Newsletters outlined their 18-month project of honing their newsletter portfolio down from 40 at the start of 2025 to just 26. A number were discontinued entirely, with the remaining being revamped and improved to focus on content quality and improved visuals.
“We started off looking at the performance of every single newsletter – not just the audience size, but the engagement and the purpose of each newsletter, and how it was performing based on those metrics,” Bonheim explained.
She pointed out that newsletters in the past were seen as promotional and traffic-driving channels, but this has changed in recent years: “We now see newsletters as pieces of journalism which should provide quality within the inbox in their own right.”
That’s not to say there’s not room for newsletters with a traffic-driving purpose. Cables, an international news and foreign affairs newsletter run by the foreign desk includes bespoke content and a column from a journalist as well as an aggregation of links to the site.
“It’s actually one of our best-performing newsletters…especially in terms of subscriber engagement,” Bonheim said.
She explained that the newsbrand used to have a mindset of each editorial desk having its own newsletter. “But that’s not actually the way the world works – it’s more about reader interests,” she pointed out. Now, some of the most popular newsletters come from desks working together to create a stronger product, such as the Royal Appointment newsletter which has contributions from the Fashion team.
As part of the quality focus, the team launched a new newsletter in 2025 called From the Editor, designed to be a new flagship for the brand. “The purpose of that has been to focus on the quality, create habit and keep readers coming back,” said Bonheim, as well as build brand loyalty and journalist recognition.
Everyone who registers for a free account on The Telegraph is automatically subscribed to the newsletter. It’s a bold strategy but one that is paying off – a year after launch, From the Editor has become their biggest source of new paying subscribers.
Bonheim said that they use open rates – minus the Apple Mail audience – to track performance, as well as comparing day-to-day engagement like growth, clicks where relevant, and opens over time. There are also ‘softer’ methods of measuring success. “We can tell when a newsletter has been really popular… because we get hundreds of reader emails coming through, and it’s often not on what you’d expect, it’s the jam-versus-cream scone debate, for example,” she explained.
Since implementing the strategy, a number of newsletters have doubled their open rates. It’s not all bad news for the newsletters which ended up discontinued either. Bonheim said she saw desks coming back with pitches for stronger offerings, some of which have now been launched. The Telegraph’s portfolio has grown again, now standing at 32 newsletters.
Quality as a differentiator
The economics of digital publishing have favoured volume and viral hits for the best part of a decade. Weaning off those sources of revenue isn’t easy. But these three publishers have demonstrated that shifting mindsets can result in not just higher quality audiences, but traffic growth.
“When volume becomes worthless, quality is a differentiator,” said Qwoted’s Chief Strategy Officer Beth Ashton, in a timely panel introduction. “The one thing that AI slop cannot replace is a direct, trusted relationship with an audience – people who choose you, who open the newsletter, who download the podcast, who renew the subscription, because what you make is worth their time.”
Listen to the whole episode above, or search MediaVoices’ ‘The Publisher Podcast’ on your podcast app of choice.
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