Our mission is to provide a comprehensive platform for magazine publishers, offering unparalleled access to our expertise and economies of scale. At Publishing Hub, we understand the challenges faced by publishers in today’s competitive landscape. Hence, we have designed a one-stop solution to review and optimise your cost base, with a particular focus on: Remit, Print, Paper, Production, Finishing, and Mailing.

We will work with you to identify opportunities for enhancing your cost efficiency and operational excellence. We aim to streamline your processes, improve resource allocation and ultimately help you achieve greater profitability and sustainability in the industry.

By partnering with Publishing Hub, you can expect:

1. Expert Analysis: Our team of experienced professionals will conduct a thorough review of your cost centres to identify potential areas for improvement and cost savings.
2. Tailored Solutions: We understand that each publisher has unique requirements, and we will work closely with you to develop customised strategies that align with your specific needs and goals.
3. Economies of Scale: Benefit from our extensive network and established relationships with suppliers, enabling you to leverage economies of scale and access more competitive pricing.
4. Enhanced Efficiency: By optimizing your remit, print, paper, production, finishing and mailing processes, we aim to streamline your operations and reduce unnecessary expense.
5. Continuous Support: Our commitment does not end with the initial assessment. We will provide ongoing support and guidance, continually seeking ways to further enhance your cost management and overall performance.

Publishing Hub is dedicated to empowering magazine publishers with the tools and insights needed to thrive in an ever-evolving publishing landscape. Let us join forces and explore how we can enhance your cost centres and elevate your publishing endeavours. Getting in touch is the first step.

To start the process, please contact Steven O’Hara at [email protected] or 01507 529 535.

Welcome to our Industry Insight section! Here, we are thrilled to announce the launch of our brand-new industry newsletter, dedicated to unravelling the ever changing magazine sector. Get ready to embark on an exciting journey with us as we delve into the minds of key industry players, gaining unique perspectives and exclusive insights directly from the driving forces behind some of the most influential businesses in the field.

In this dynamic landscape of constant change and evolution, staying ahead of the curve is paramount. Our mission is to bridge the gap between you and these industry leaders, bringing you closer to their strategies, visions and innovations. By understanding how they navigate through the challenges and seize opportunities, we aim to equip you with the knowledge to make informed decisions and take advantage of your own opportunities in this ever-changing environment.

Join us as we sit down with CEOs, entrepreneurs and visionaries who have shaped the magazine sector. Through in-depth interviews, candid discussions, and thought-provoking articles, our Industry Insight newsletter will be your go-to resource for staying informed and inspired.

Prepare to unlock the secrets to success, gain valuable knowledge, and foster a deeper appreciation for the intricacies of the magazine industry. Together, we will navigate the currents of transformation and growth, all while embracing the future of publishing.

Welcome to Industry Insight!

To start the process, please contact Steven O’Hara at [email protected] or 01507 529 535

Jonathan Bunting – Chief Executive Officer at Smiths News plc and Founder of Pass It On homeless charity.

Jonathan, can you give a summary of your work history and journey?

Of course Steve. I joined WH Smiths News on a graduate trainee programme in 1996 and undertook roles within Birmingham and Wolverhampton locations before moving to the Western Regional office and then a year later into head office. I became Trade Marketing Director at 29, Commercial Director at 34, MD of Smiths News at 39 and CEO of Smiths News PLC at 49. Most of my early roles were on the commercial side of our business.

Other than your current role, which was the one you enjoyed most?

I’ve honestly enjoyed almost every role I’ve ever undertaken but if I had to pick two I would go for either the Commercial Director role, the highlight being when we grew our market share from 39% to 55%, or the MD role… being accountable for the total performance of the company’s largest division was hugely challenging, brought a greater degree of variety, and I think has stood me in good stead for my current role. Ultimately the newspaper and magazine industry is a people industry, and so is Smiths News, therefore being able to help foster that culture and work with some fabulous people made for a very enjoyable work environment.

With UK magazine and newspaper sales continuing to shrink year on year and your costs continuing to rise, how do you plan on filling that gap?

We have the same challenges that all links in our chain have Steve. We have to reduce costs while protecting service and finding new scale profit streams. We are making progress across all fronts.

What exciting new ventures are Smiths News trialling/testing and what will the impact be on the supply chain?

We have a simple phrase that we use within the business to guide us. Enhance the core, add more, and move up the value chain. Newspapers, magazines and collectibles are the bedrock of what we do. We can’t and won’t neglect that. It is our collective industry responsibility to maximise the lifetime of our publishers’ physical products in our retail customers’ stores. We have started to deliver products from adjacent categories into three leading supermarkets; we have launched a network-wide recycle collection service, with 2500 customers now sending back their cardboard and plastic to us on a paid-for basis; and we continue to identify new products and services we can offer our supply chain partners.

While most of our new profit streams are physical, they are not all. We have launched Love Media in the last 12 months, in partnership with Lucid Digital, to enable publishers and consumers to buy/sell single digital copies from their local retail store, without having to sign up to a long-term commitment. It’s early days in our growth journey but we are pleased with the progress we are making.

What can the publishing community do to help the wholesalers and on the flipside what currently happens that causes unnecessary work?

I think on the whole we work well with our publisher clients. Our collective challenge is not how we work with each other, but rather how we work together to maximise the profitability of the category at retail. If we don’t we will continue to lose space, see range titles struggle to find a place in the market, and this in turn I think will damage the secondary income streams that many publishers have developed. Their brands benefit massively from the credibility and exposure that being easily available to consumers at retail gives them.

What do you think the wholesale business will look like in five years?

For Smiths News I still expect news and magazines to be the largest part of our business, but we will be a multi-category business delivering many more services up and down channel than we do today.

How does the changing legislation on electric vehicles change things in the near future?

We are all mindful of being a good neighbour and doing our bit for sustainability. We have set science-based targets to help ensure our actions make a meaningful difference and are not just token gestures or platitudes. The debate around electric vehicles is just part of that bigger debate. As you may be aware, the vast majority of our final mile deliveries are undertaken by individual subcontractors. There is not a huge movement within that population to switch vehicle types yet, not least because electric vehicles are not yet fit for purpose for long-distance routes with a full vehicle; there is not yet a second-hand market for electric vans, and finally because many people still question whether it will in fact be hydrogen rather than electric which eventually wins that race.

With AI now here and businesses starting to see how it can help, where do you see Smiths News embracing this technology?

We can absolutely see how our publisher clients might use AI for content creation. For us its very early days however and in truth we are not really using it to any meaningful degree. Whether we can adopt this approach for route optimisation, network utilisation etc. only time will tell but they are the areas we will look at first.

Smiths News was renowned as an amazing pool for publishers to find talent, does this still happen? If not, why not?

Yes it’s amazing how many of our current clients and customers once worked for Smiths News. It does still happen but to a much lesser degree, not least because we have fewer people and generally there is less recruitment going on as businesses look to find ways to reduce their cost base.

Smiths News has been helping and improving outcomes for the vulnerable and homeless for years with the Pass It On initiative. Firstly, well done to you and the team. How can the industry help, is there a request and contact that you want to make available?

Pass It On is a registered charity. Each year we help circa 2000 homeless and vulnerable people in the UK by providing practical support. We give to them warm clothes, sleeping bags, a rucksack full of toiletries, food and underwear, and just as importantly we spend time to stop and talk to our homeless clients, when others walk past as if they were wallpaper.

We would love to receive more support. It’s super easy for people to help. They can donate as individuals, or as a business. Donations can be money, but they can be all the practical items that I previously mentioned. Every pound that is donated goes directly to help the homeless. There are no admin costs, agencies being paid, expenses for trustees or volunteers etc. So when you donate you know you are truly helping rather than funding a bigger corporate like charity. If you visit our website www.passitonofficial.org you can find out much more.

Finally, is there anything else that you would like to talk about?

Yes – one of my colleagues at Birmingham House over 20 years ago was a young ambitious guy called Steve O’Hara. He was working in customer services but we could all see he was better suited to the commercial side of the business… We moved him into the copy management team and his career went from strength to strength. No idea what happened to him though 😊

David Atkins – Owner Newsstand

David, can you give a summary of your work history and journey?

If you’re sure…

I’ve been attached to the newspaper and magazine industry pretty much my whole working life, but have still had quite a varied (and chequered) time of it. JG Palmer is a family company that’s been going since 1898 with Newsstand being the current trading name. We were generally wholesalers for most of that time, but we have always looked to be innovative and push boundaries – I think that gene has run in the family and keeps things interesting but also quite stressful, as processes rarely stabilise.

Anyway, after starting off in the warehouse, I’ve run magazine packing operations, polybagged newspapers, developed London hotel supply chains, 2D barcode systems for retail vouchers (but 10 years too early) and had a lovely few years building RASCAL solutions for Tesco and Sainsbury’s with the Kembles. Not willing to stay still for too long, I’ve exited most of these businesses and since 2011 it has really just been all about developing Newsstand, which has been a lot of fun.

Other than your current role, which was the one you enjoyed most?

I didn’t go to university (I maintain that this was because I was being obtuse) so, at 19 I was driving newspapers to hotels around northern France. Despite the 3am starts, these were good times and when I had the least responsibility; I’m not sure what that says about me. The only thing was that staff training back in those days didn’t quite stretch to explaining the ‘priorité à droite’ driving rule – so I did end up driving through a clothes shop window in Le Touquet accompanied by a 7 Series BMW and its amazingly tolerant occupants. Ironically, my manager was less pleasant about it.

Can you explain what Newsstand can offer to large, medium and smaller publishers?

Newsstand was the first of its kind and we have always sent out all our own sales, allowing us to control our business. We’d had our wholesale contracts taken from us in the mid-2000s, which all felt extremely unjust at the time, so the theme at Newsstand has always been customer service rather than having the magazine distributors as our clients.

We started selling single copies back in 2012 with next day or worldwide delivery and this was against the backdrop of having to wait 12 weeks for a subscription with the publishers and their resellers. Generally, we have over 7000 different magazine issues in stock.

To answer your question, these efficiencies have proved extremely popular and we wanted to bring this level of service to publishers who were still just offering the subscription package. We fulfil all online print sales for over 200 publishers and we see and process their single copy sales in the same way that we do subscriptions. This means that we can provide cheaper postal rates for our publishing clients even on one single copy per day, as it’s sent alongside and sorted in with the Newsstand retail sales.

Orders come in automatically from publishers’ own websites directly onto our packlists and are despatched the same day. We also provide white label sites, customer services and tax processes for their EU sales as well as some retail distribution (non traditional, of course…).

Alongside fulfilment, the retail website is very well established and we undertake numerous cross selling exercises which we can extend to interested publishers – on that, our customers have generally paid well for a magazine that they want and our database shouldn’t be compared to one that is populated by discounted subscription purchasers; that’s a different market altogether.

Our publishers’ volumes range from very small to around the 10,000 single copies per issue level and each publisher has unique requirements, so we are keen to continue our processes manually. This rules us out when it comes to the larger publishers but frankly, our mainly indie publishers require this approach and having done my time with automation I would need to be dragged, kicking and screaming to go back there anyway.

With UK magazine and newspaper sales continuing to shrink year on year, how can Newsstand help deliver a new revenue stream or cost savings?

My view is that we must continue to concentrate on making sure we have the best availability of product, the best service to the consumer and the most efficient postal management. There is no doubt that some of this has been lost in the information age and Newsstand is here to bring it all back and for our publishers to have it at their disposal.

For a decade we have been supporting the indie publishing sector, which has different needs to the mainstream and is performing a lot better and to a younger audience. The higher cover price, increased production values and passion that is put into these publications is wonderful and we can already see the higher circulation titles taking inspiration from them. If the mainstream publications are suffering, it is for other reasons than just being a print magazine.

With both economics and the environment in mind, our business model reduces shrink dramatically from the traditional retail model. Whether that’s through lower returns levels or allowing consumers to only buy the issues that they require at a fair price to the publisher.

Finally, if you’d like the quick and contentious answer, it’s that publishers should provide Newsstand with a 50% margin so that all magazines can be ordered with free post and next day delivery. I’ve offered Newsstand to the industry a few times in order to achieve this but to no avail (another downside to big machines, perhaps). A shame as it could produce incredible results.

What exciting new features are Newsstand developing?

Anyone who knows me or my business will know that we have had several years of IT pain that has stunted our progress significantly. We appear to be through that now and there are several projects on the sidelines that should be forthcoming in the second half of this year. We have developments planned in retail supply and the internationalisation of Newsstand but before that we are working to assist our indie publishing clients in finding more brand support for their magazines, which is something different for us.

What do you think Newsstand will look like in five years?

I don’t mind as long as someone else is running it.

With AI now here and businesses starting to see how it can help, where do you see Newsstand embracing this technology?

I have had a look into this as I am sure all business owners have. At Newsstand we have a Magazine Concierge concept on the website, so there’s no doubt he’ll be getting an AI cape at some point. We also handle a huge amount of information in the office with all the titles, issues and independent publisher requirements – so I’ve been reviewing how AI can help us find the correct information quickly and indeed provide us with the answers before we knew we needed them.

I’m 50% innovator and 50% Luddite so it’s all quite ambiguous, but what I’d like to think is that the Indie magazine publishing industry will be the last to churn out AI content in print. It might be worth someone setting up a code of practice in this area, perhaps…

In any case, I can only hope they manage the situation better than was done when the internet last threatened print publishing.