Pod in a Pub: Publishing's pivotal moments this year, and predictions for 2025

This episode of The Publisher Podcast by Media Voices – our last for this season – was recorded at the White Swan in Aldgate, London on November 27th in front of a live audience.

In the absence of our usual annual Media Moments report*, we took a fun look back at some of the pivotal publishing moments of the year, and what 2025 might have in store. The audience were invited to participate so we’re able to include contributions from wiser folks than us!

The team’s top stories from 2024

• The Onion announcing it had bought Infowars after Alex Jones’ bankruptcy.
• Google abandoned a plan it announced 4 years ago and has delayed and delayed since then to block third-party cookies from Chrome.
• A federal judge ruled that Google illegally maintains its monopoly in search and search advertising. The government are now proposing Google divest Chrome.
• Condé Nast decided to to fold iconic music-review website Pitchfork into men’s lifestyle magazine GQ
• Five former Pitchfork journalists are getting the band together to start a new online music publication, Hearing Things. 

Predictions for 2025

The print revival comes to news

Esther is hopeful that next year will see a revival of news print. Not newspapers, but news print; weekly or monthly magazine-style editions. Newspapers are clearly in a long-term decline that is unlikely to reverse. But a look at what’s happening with the magazine print revival shows that there is hope for the format, albeit different to what it was a few decades ago.

Caution on over-diversification

At the PPA’s Independent Publisher Conference, Sift’s Chief Strategy Officer Louise White pointed out that the industry has got too absorbed with multiple revenue streams. “The obsession with diversifying revenues is dangerous,” she said on Linkedin. “That’s a bigger media play. Most independents don’t have the expertise or bandwidth and it leads to mediocrity at many rather than excellence in few.”

So the ‘mix of six’ saying we’ve been fans of for years should perhaps be revised for 2025. The key is…three?