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Fighting for journalism and profitable news media
Telegraph takeover gets Govt approval | Sun losses grow amid Google changes
And Mark Allen Group posts pre-tax loss and writes off £5m from Bonhill purchase
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Good morning from the team at Press Gazette on Wednesday, 15 April.
😮💨 There was relief in the Telegraph newsroom yesterday as Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy nodded through Axel Springer’s £575m takeover.
The UK has a new billionaire media owner in the form of Mathias Döpfner who looks like an improvement on previous Telegraph proprietors (although the bar was set pretty low).
He’s a journalist by background, who climbed the greasy corporate poll to become the CEO of a global news and media giant. Döpfner has the ambition, vision and cash needed to run the next stage of The Telegraph’s digital transition.
Axel Springer sold its classified advertising business in 2024 in an £11.3bn deal so has a massive war chest to invest in Döpfner’s stated aim of becoming the “leading transatlantic media company for digital journalism and related business models”.
After being in a holding pattern for nearly three years, and wasting more than £31m on sale costs, The Telegraph can finally start moving forward.
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📉 The Sun is betting its digital future on video and paid online content.
The latest financial figures (for the year to the end of June 2025) explain why change is so urgent for the UK tabloid with revenue falling £23m year on year to just over £273m.
Structural decline in print is largely to blame for the fall in turnover. The Sun does not publish a print ABC figure anymore but I would estimate daily sales are now down to around the 500,000 mark (compared with 1.3 million at the turn of the decade).
The cost of arguing (and settling) some 41 legal claims over illegal newsgathering at The Sun was a major factor pushing News Group Newspapers into a £53.3m pre-tax loss.
The results also flagged concerns over declining referral traffic from unspecified tech platforms (for which, read Facebook and Google).
There was happier news from subscription-funded Times Media where digital growth outpaces print decline. Both revenue and profits were up for the year to June 2025.
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🏢 Meanwhile, the ambition of privately-owned B2B publishing stalwarts Mark Allen Group is undimmed despite a torrid set of financial results.
The group has set a target of reaching £100m turnover by 2029. But the “uncertain financial and economic climate” led to “far higher costs” and a £1.4m pre-tax loss for the year to March 2025.
Three years after paying £6.5m for Bonhill Group’s wealth management and financial services B2B brands, MAG has written off £5m of the purchase price.
At the time Mark Allen described the Bonhill titles as “fantastic brands” that gave the company a vital foothold in Singapore and Hong Kong. Bonhill has performed “very poorly” since then, according to MAG, and had a “heavy impact on profits”.