Three years after the 57-year-old Time Our magazine stopped printing its original London edition, the Australian publisher whom it had inspired to launch a digital-print magazine in Melbourne is preparing to fill the gap. The stylish 15-year-old Broadsheet – which claims a regular audience of more than 1mn for its digital and print editions throughout Australia and New Zealand – is currently recruiting an editor-in-chief for its planned London launch this year.
Broadsheet self-describes as “one of Australia’s most influential independent publishers and award-winning media brands. In addition to our website, we reach millions of readers through social media, print papers, videos, cookbooks and events. Our goal is to connect our audience with the very best our cities have to offer, from food and drink to art and design to entertainment and travel”.
It was founded in 2009 by Nick Shelton in his Melbourne hometown. After university, he had been living in London and working as a barista at Flat White, the Australian-owned Soho cafe that is credited with introducing Brits to their favorite coffee back in 2005.
He launched Broadsheet with a A$20k bank loan (secured on his parents’ house). It became a stunning creative and financial success for someone who (apart from working for a catering company in university and as a barista) had no prior experience either in media or hospitality. It quickly succeeded in capturing an Australian audience of (mostly young) people who care about food, drink, fashion, home, entertainment and travel.
It became consistently profitable by Year 3 and is currently believed to be generating A$15mn revenue (from advertising, content marketing, and sponsorship) and an estimated A$4mn EBITDA. It has succeeded in staying independent of the country’s dominant publishers and of external funding. In January, it had some 1.5mn online visits from an audience that is predominantly aged 25-34 and 60% female. It has a reputation for prompting the runaway success or ignominious failure of restaurants with its fiercely independent reviews. It has also been responsible for its own pop-up restaurants, cafes – and cookbooks and videos.
Shelton (who still owns 100% of the company) has also become a prominent publisher. He campaigned for a slice of the A$200mn payments (made as a result of legislative pressure in Australia) to leading news organisations by Google and Meta to be shared across leading non-news publishers – like Broadsheet.
Broadsheet and Mia Freedman’s Mamamia have become the standout achievers among digital media startups in Australia.
Despite admitting that he had been inspired by London’s Time Out (and had subsequently discussed his own publishing startup with founder Tony Elliott before his death in 2020), Shelton’s Broadsheet is focused much more on food and home. It’s a quite different product, appealing to a broader and, arguably, more stylish audience.
But these are different times.
It is 57 years since Time Out magazine was launched by UK student drop-out Elliott. In addition to music and culture in the UK capital, it covered the youth issues of the day including racial equality and police harassment. The first issue featured a Ronald Reagan movie season, and an “AgitProp” section which listed all the week’s political meetings and demonstrations. It invited readers to “meet the fuzz” at an anti-Vietnam war march. Elliott was fascinated with the underground culture of 1960s London and the apparent need for reliable information about what was going on, in the arts, sports and political activism. Early issues even helped promote some well-publicised, illegal “squatting” at prominent (but unoccupied) London houses. Time Out was an instant success, and the ads started flowing in.
Over the years, the magazine shed its political roots and swelled to a 110,000-circulation weekly at its peak, but it remained the trendy voice of London. There were troubles along the way, including a 1981 strike by journalists who walked-out to start a co-operative-managed rival, City Limits, in protest at Elliott’s decision to scrap his policy of paying all journalists the same (yes).
That rival lasted more than a decade, while Richard Branson’s well-funded Event magazine, closed after just six months. Time Out gradually shed the politics and grew to become London’s leading lifestyle and listings magazine, then expanded into New York and other cities in the 1990s, as well as publishing best-selling city guides around the world. In the 1970s, Condé Nast was reported to have offered £100mn to acquire it. Although the offer was never quite that high, Elliott came to regard the US-owned glossy publisher as the perfect partner, the one that got away. There was no shortage of lesser suitors with which he flirted. But the history of Time Out has been punctuated by financial pressure. It always had many more plans than cash.
Elliott had been determined always to remain in sole control of his business. He was a popular, enthusiastic and passionate boss who never quite trusted anyone else with his brainchild. A former colleague once said: “Tony is a suburban cottage industry. He’s essentially a small shopkeeper.”
But, by 2004, the Time Out founder was saying: “The company was started with no money and we’ve traded for 36 years and constantly expanded using profits and bank backing. Its reached the point when, if we could find the right financial backer, it would make a lot of sense for me to sell between 15-30% of the company to give it some working capital and so I can take a bit of money out.”
Three years later, he gave an unwitting clue to the company’s financial fragility in a newspaper interview: “One of the reasons my salary is so high is so I can service a huge mortgage on my £5mn six-bedroom house in St John’s Wood. The plan was to reduce the mortgage by taking dividends out of the company in bite-size chunks over the years, but we’re continuously expanding so I’ve never done that. In the meantime, I end up being the bank guarantor for the business overdrafts because I’ve got such a valuable house, so I have to have it.”
Time Out had a number of very profitable years, but the founder seemed unconcerned about the losses in between. And, while the post-digital magazine industry was consolidating, Elliott clung to his independence. He had always been much more interested in ensuring the quality of magazine content than in managing the business fundamentals, even though he himself made almost all the company’s key decisions.
He frequently spent months with a succession of financial advisers and brokers discussing how to raise capital for the cash-strapped business. But interested investors wanted to know how they could ever earn a return on their cash if there was to be no change in Time Out’s no-low profit strategy or an eventual sale of the business.
But Elliott was having none of it.
The result was that his widely-admired company perpetually lacked the funds to support its ambitious strategies. And that was even before digital disruption shook the foundations of print media everywhere. While his magazine had survived an onslaught of new UK print listings rivals, the web caught him flat-footed. Time Out’s listings content made it especially vulnerable to replication online.
Although the company subsequently developed its digital audience, it never had the robust strategy or the investment with which to counter falling advertising and copy sales (which eventually prompted the switch of most Time Out editions to free distribution, before ceasing print altogether).
The once-golden magazine gradually ran out of options.
In November 2010, the UK-based tech investor Oakley Capital bought a 50% share in a deal which paid-off Elliott’s company and personal debt and valued Time Out at some £20mn. The Time Out founder sounded enthusiastic: “I have considered many potential investors over the last seven years to help the brand with the next phase of development and I believe that Oakley Capital, with its entrepreneurial operational focus, will help us with this. I genuinely believe that I have found a real partner for what I expect to be a hugely successful worldwide digital journey.”
But the 50:50 partnership lasted just six months.
The business soon needed more cash and, in exchange, Oakley increased its shareholding to 66%. Tony Elliott had lost control. Before the £195mn IPO, his shareholding had fallen further, to 2.6% and, after the IPO, to just 1.4%. Having relinquished the chairmanship, the Time Out founder spent his last years merely as a non-executive director of the company he had built.
Time Out is a 57-year-old media parable. In the pre-internet age, it pioneered a magazine style across entertainment listings, classifieds, and the arts in many cities, and went global with its travel and restaurant guides. But the financials never quite caught up. The upshot is that the founder – who had, for so long, been reluctant to reduce his 100% ownership – lost the lot for a small fraction of the millions he once waved away. And, now, the brand depends on the success not of media but of food markets. As IPO investors were told in 2016: “Time Out has significantly grown and developed its digital media and e-commerce business, transitioned the magazines to a free print model in key geographies, consolidated the brand ownership by acquiring back the key licensee territories and acquired the Time Out food market in Lisbon, Portugal.”
Almost a decade later, Time Out’s digital coverage of culture, entertainment, food and drink in an estimated 300 cities and more than 50 countries is all but eclipsed by its food markets. Since the 2014 opening in Lisbon (which remains one of the city’s most popular tourist destinations) Time Out has opened 10 more food markets in the US, Canada, Middle East, South Africa and Spain, with a further six under construction.
The strategy seems finally to be succeeding.
The UK listed company became profitable in 2023 and last year generated £103mn revenue and £12mn EBITDA. With a claimed “brand reach” of 150mn people and an enterprise value of c£200mn (finally back to the value of the 2016 IPO), the post-digital strategy for Tony Elliott’s legendary brand is now succeeding. But it still seems likely that the longterm profit growth of Time Out Group will depend on sharply reducing its digital content and concentrating just on the food markets.
Whether any of that makes a difference to the Broadsheet plans for London remains to be seen. This month, Nick Shelton is advertising for a launch editor who can “bring our distinctive voice to one of the world’s most dynamic cultural capitals.”
Shelton told the Australian Mumbrella site that his business was “in great shape” and it was time to expand. “I’ve got a really terrific management team, including a managing director here in Australia, and I feel really comfortable with the way the business is running.”
The founder (who is planning to base himself in London for much of 2025) has not disclosed his timetable. But he is believed to be planning a ‘soft launch’ in May and the main launch in September this year. Shelton also has not disclosed any possible collaboration with other media firms. He is known to have had exploratory talks over the last 12 months with the Financial Times, the London Standard (the former evening newspaper which is now a weekly) and, presumably, also The Guardian with which Broadsheet has been collaborating on advertising sales and content in Australia.
Some who have discussed Shelton’s painstaking plans during his regular visits to the UK last year, have sniped that he will find it more difficult to succeed than in Australia, especially with competition from the London-centric daily news brands. But the Broadsheet founder knows just how – almost 60 years ago – Time Out succeeded in the face of such scepticism.
Australian fans of their award-winning Broadsheet are betting on Nick Shelton’s eventual success in “establishing Broadsheet London as a recognised and leading brand in the city’s cultural landscape”. Keep watching.
