Welcome to your daily Press Gazette media briefing on Wednesday, 17 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.

Substack is definitely having a moment.

There’s a clear trend across our latest global, US and UK traffic data. Other publishers are struggling to get traction while Substack leads growth in all three rankings.

Notably, it’s not just about audience growth, it’s engagement too: in our UK data for July, minutes spent with Substack were up almost 300% in a year.

Substack was 48th when ranked by audience - about equal with regional website of the year Kent Online - but 24th by total minutes and 12th by average minutes per person.

In the US, Substack was one of just five sites with year-on-year growth in visits in August - and has overtaken the Daily Mail - while globally it was the only one out of the entire top 50 English-language online newsbrands.

What does this tell us? It’s not that more traditional news publishers are about to be put out of business by Substack and its thousands of writers. But it does show the power of a collective platform like this in a world when people put value on individual writers and sometimes very specific and niche topics that might struggle as a standalone publication.

In other data, we also have the latest UK national newspaper ABC figures. After more than four years of pretty consistent free distribution, Metro’s figures dropped by 30% in August - but we understand it was a deliberate adjustment for the summer and it’s back to normal now.

We’ve got subscription lessons from Mediahuis Ireland - which crossed the 100,000 mark in June - from our conference last week. Some of the advice effectively translates to “go big or go home”.

And finally, a bill was put forward by the UK Government yesterday that would criminalise public officials lying to the media.

Hopefully this would put a stop to outrages like the Post Office allegedly lying to the BBC and making it doubt the accuracy of its perfectly legitimate reporting. But could it also stop public servants wanting to speak to the press at all if they can help it? If they don’t speak to us, they might think, they can’t get caught out.

If your journalism has made a difference this year, enter the British Journalism Awards now for a chance of winning the ultimate newsroom accolade. Deadline for entry submissions is next Thursday 25 September.

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