The digital publishing industry has had its share of gloomy headlines lately — from traffic declines to AI disruption.
But as judging begins for this year’s AOP Digital Publishing Awards, Richard Reeves, Managing Director, AOP UK, pauses to celebrate a different side of the industry: the brave, the bold, the joyful and the pragmatic publishers who keep pushing forward despite the challenges.
It’s time for a bit of sunshine. Lately, digital publishing’s word cloud has been a little gloomy. A scattering of “volatility”, a gust of “traffic decline”, a shower of “budgetary pressures”, followed by the inevitable thunderclap of “AI disruption”.
But as we get closer to judging entries for this year’s AOP Digital Publishing Awards, I want to focus on a different set of words: the brave, the bold, the joyful, and the pragmatic.
These are the qualities that keep this scrappy, multidisciplinary industry pushing forward through whatever headwinds blow our way, and I want to take the time to highlight past award winners who embody them.
The brave
Journalists who truly move the needle do so through unshakeable bravery. They’re willing to persistently investigate issues they are told to ignore or even put themselves in direct danger to deliver society-changing work. It’s the bravery to dedicate years of hard work and effort with no guarantee of reward, all to surface the truth.
Few embody this combination of dedication and bravery better than Computer Weekly’s Karl Flinders, who was named Journalist of the Year in 2022 and 2024.
A chief reporter without the resources of a national news brand behind him, Flinders’ obsessive, boots-on-the-ground investigation exposed the now infamous Post Office Horizon scandal.
His work has since been cited in Parliament, the High Court, and the Court of Appeal, not to mention ITV’s ‘Mr Bates vs The Post Office’ dramatisation.
Flinders proved the value of independent trade journalists’ focus and narrower remit, who can pull at seemingly innocuous threads that unravel into massive miscarriages of justice.
Then there’s the technology that allows the brave work of journalists to reach far and wide. Journalism can’t change the world if the world can’t hear its message.
Just last year, The Telegraph’s ‘Ukraine: The Latest’ won Best Use of Audio 2025 in recognition of their AI-translated frontline reporting on the Ukraine war, which disseminated their news to Russian and Ukrainian listeners.
Behind The Telegraph’s war reporter’s, who put their life on the line to document history as it is being written, is an entire organisation dedicated to ensuring their bravery is not in vain.
The bold
To be bold is to stick one’s head above the parapet, to accept the risks that come with being a first-mover, and break with convention even when there is no roadmap to success.
Bold publishers blaze a trail others can then follow more safely, pushing the edges of our industry into new directions.
Just look at The Independent, who, in 2016, dove into the future with both feet to become the UK’s first digital-only news brand. They’ve remained a standard-bearer for successful digitalisation ever since; against a broader industry transition none can afford to ignore.
The AOP Awards recognised their bold transformation in 2021, awarding them with the Best Use of Data. They used first-party behavioural signals to identify their most engaged “super fans”, shifted to a subscriber-led model, and used audience intelligence to build loyalty and reduce churn. If the strategy sounds familiar, it’s because it’s the one many publishers have since emulated.
Being bold also means getting hands-on with untested and unproven tools. Newsquest won Best Digital Publishing Innovation 2025 through their development of a generative AI tool that made short work of much of the “churn” of press releases and syndicated stories that are a core part of local publishers’ service, but waste journalism resources.
Now, Newsquest’s reporters can put more time into their local beats and be bold for the communities that otherwise don’t have a voice in the media.
The joyful
They say if you find a job you love, you won’t work a day in your life. A wonderful thing about the publishing industry is the number of people you will meet for whom this adage is true.
You can feel it in their work, bringing joy to audiences through engaging, creative, and compelling content and turning their attention towards positive societal change.
Anyone who truly loves their audience knows quality beats quantity. Winner of Small Digital Publisher of the Year 2025, whynow Media, is a multifaceted entertainment company that specialises in connecting niche artists with audiences through short-form, social-first mini-documentaries.
They trade scale for intimacy and use smart branding and merchandising opportunities to fund the glossy production values that make their subjects and their fans feel special.
2025 was clearly a joyful year, because it’s also when The Big Issue won Best Publisher-led Social Good Initiative for their partnership with Specsavers.
The brands collaborated on “Vision for Change”, which provided free eye-care support for Big Issue vendors, coinciding with a multichannel social impact campaign that leveraged vendors’ personal stories to highlight systemic barriers to eye-care while raising the charity’s profile.
By deploying a data-driven ‘Project>10’ strategy, the campaign almost quadrupled social engagement and delivered close to double PR coverage.
The pragmatic
Pragmatism means “keeping the lights on” through sustainable business models. It’s the often uncelebrated behind-the-scenes work to leverage data assets, “verticalise” content and audience strategies, and support commercial partners. They may rarely make it in the news, but they do make the news happen.
A multi-year winner of Digital Consumer Publishing Company of the Year, Immediate Media’s success is built on an agile and accessible technology platform that unifies content, commerce, and data.
By giving their 150-strong tech team are shared point-of-view, they can build once and share across brands to maximise the value of their 19 million customers.
Their pragmatic, platform-agnostic content strategy and pursuit of digital products has kept advertising revenues steady, while digital subscriber growth recently surpassed the storied magazine publisher’s print customers.
Pragmatism also means knowing what your partners want, then giving it to them. News UK’s vast Nucleus data platform leverages first-party and declared data from its 42 million users to deliver audience-specific campaign recommendations and provide performance metrics that go far beyond mere clicks to surface intent, attention, and ROI.
Nucleus can stand toe-to-toe with any of Big Tech’s offerings and has amassed quite the trophy cabinet, including Best Use of Data 2024 and Best Media Technology Partner 2025.
Do you count among the brave, bold, joyful, or pragmatic?
There’s still time to enter for the AOP Digital Publishing Awards 2026. Even if you don’t, I hope these examples from across the industry have provided a ray of sunshine for what is possible when we let our best qualities leave a mark on our work, our sector, and society itself.
For more information on how to enter the Digital Publishing Awards, click here.
Entries close Thursday 12th March.