UK Media Podcasts & Journalism Newsletters

Journalism has a trade press of its own, and most reporters discover it late. It is where you find out that a desk has a new commissioning editor before the pitch bounces, that a title in your patch has closed or launched, that a regulator has ruled on a practice you were about to use, and that the referral traffic your employer built its plan on has stopped arriving. None of this reaches general news, and almost none of it reaches you through social platforms any more.

This page lists the titles worth following, grouped by what they are and where they are written. The first three tables are UK trade sites, UK podcasts and UK newsletters. The fourth is international, and it is kept separate deliberately: the American titles are excellent on ideas and business models and useless on UK rules, and a directory that mixed them together would quietly imply that a US newsletter can tell you something about IPSO or the Editors’ Code.

For the practice of covering this material as a beat rather than reading it, see Media Industry Reporting. For the outlets themselves rather than the coverage of them, see the Newsroom Directory and the Hyperlocal Directory.

How to read these tables

Formatsays whether a title is a website, a podcast, an email newsletter or some combination. Where an organisation runs genuinely separate products on separate schedules — Press Gazette’s site, its Substack edition and its podcast, for instance — each is listed on its own row with its own address, so you can subscribe to the one you want instead of being sent to a homepage.

Descriptionsare drawn from each title’s own site and from what it currently publishes. Where a title describes itself in its own words, those words are quoted and attributed as such. We do not publish subscriber counts, launch dates or presenter line-ups that we could not read off the source itself, because those are the claims that go stale fastest and that directories most often copy from each other without checking.

Scope is labelled on every table. If a title is written from outside the UK it sits in the international table, whatever its readership here.

The directory

Twenty-five titles, each fetched and confirmed as currently publishing. This is a working shortlist, not a census of everything that exists.

UK trade press — the sites you can read daily

Scope: UK-focused

Trade news organisations covering UK publishers, broadcasters and regulators. All of these publish on a near-daily cycle and most run a free email edition alongside the site.

UK podcasts

Scope: UK-focused

Interview and analysis shows about the British media. All available in any podcast app; the links below go to each show’s own page.

UK newsletters and research

Scope: UK-focused / UK-based

Email-first titles, plus the UK research body whose work the rest of the industry quotes.

International — read for ideas, not for UK rules

Scope: International

Widely read in UK newsrooms, but written from outside the UK regulatory system. Nothing in this table should be taken as a description of UK law, UK press regulation or the UK funding landscape.

Building a routine you will actually keep

The failure mode with this material is subscribing to everything in week one and reading none of it by week three. The titles in these tables publish at very different rhythms: several of the trade sites and email editions go out on every weekday, the interview podcasts are weekly, and the research organisations publish a handful of substantial reports a year. Mixing them without noticing the difference is what produces an unread inbox.

A workable pattern is one daily, one weekly and one occasional. Take a single daily briefing for the industry news — the email edition rather than the site, so it comes to you. Take one weekly podcast for the interviews, which is where you hear the reasoning behind decisions the news coverage only reports. And follow one research source for the numbers you will eventually need to cite, which for UK work usually means the Reuters Institute.

If you are early in your career, add a title aimed at your stage rather than at editors and executives. The pay data, graduate scheme listings and pitching guidance in the entry-level titles are more immediately useful than a story about a publisher’s quarterly results. Our careers section covers routes in, and the communities and networks page covers the places where journalists discuss this material rather than just publish it.

Frequently Asked Questions