Welcome to your daily Press Gazette media briefing on Friday, 12 September, brought to you today in association with Admiral, The Visitor Relationship Management (VRM) Company.

In today’s feature, Admiral shares a practical playbook for media executives looking to break down silos, unify fragmented visitor experiences, and unlock higher ARPV and long-term revenue. Learn how publishers are using VRM to connect the dots across adblock recovery, subscriptions, consent, and engagement — with zero dev lift.

Congratulations to all the winners at last night’s Press Gazette Future of Media Awards.

You can see all the pictures from the night and the judges’ citations here.

The i Paper picked up national website of the year after impressing judges with its innovations, usability and traffic growth.

The Guardian was another big winner, taking the prizes for app of the year and reader revenue success.

I’ve taken a look at the full audited Guardian accounts (released yesterday) which show digital reader revenue grew 22% year on year to £107m. This fuelled an overall revenue increase of 7% year on year to £276m.

This puts The Guardian well ahead of the game, compared to competitors, helped of course by the fact it does not need to turn a profit. Losses for the year of £24m were absorbed by the title’s £1.25bn endowment fund.

The Guardian has got increasingly sophisticated in its marketing efforts on reader revenue: varying those annoying pop-ups, producing more editorially-led email campaigns and adding more subscriber-style benefits (such as ad-free access and unlimited use of the app). Congratulations to The Guardian’s chief supporter officer Liz Wynn and the rest of the team.

The title has done particularly well in the US (adding £10m of revenue year on year) helped by tying pleas for reader support to its outspoken opposition to President Trump.

We also have an update on our latest scoop about likely faked PR content making it into mainstream publishers. Reach has said it is taking action to stop this apparently AI-generated content making it into publication. See the updated story here.

Yesterday also saw Press Gazette host our Future of Media Technology Conference.

We will have lots of insights from that event to share in due course, but one analogy particularly resonated with me from the day (perhaps because I was thinking about lunch at the time).

Lucky Gunasekara of Miso Technologies (which has created an in-house LLM for US technology publishing specialist O’Reilly Media) said news organisations have an essential competitive advantage over ChatGPT and the other AI answer engines.

Publishers should be offering readers steak. The AI companies can take that and turn it into a hamburger, but you can’t turn a hamburger back into a steak.

It made sense at the time anyway. Have a great weekend when you get there.

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On Press Gazette

Future of Media Awards 2025: Guardian and FT are double winners and The i Paper is national site of the year

The i Paper and Kent Online were named national and regional websites of the year.

Read more