Out of Office

This is episode 17 which I recorded with Pippa Leary, the Managing Director and Publisher of Free News and Lifestyle at News Corp Australia as we walked through a beautifully sunny Prince Alfred Park in Surrey Hills Sydney. Our conversation is split roughly into two equal parts. In the first half, Pippa talks about her early career and how she went from a degree in Arts and Hip Hop at Sydney Unive...

Welcome to Episode 16 of the Out of Office podcast, recorded in December 2024 as we walked along the Regent's Canal in London from King's Cross to Camden and back. David recently spoke at our Pugpig Customer Summit, sharing his perspectives on how AI is changing the way that we discover content and providing publishers and other content owners a whole new opportunity to draw the lines of negotiati...

Welcome to Episode 15 of the Out of Office podcast, recorded in December 2024 with Chris Duncan as we walked along the Thames on a cold winters day in London. Chris and I met many years ago while both working at News UK, where he ultimately became MD at The Times. He then moved from news media to magazines as the CEO of Bauer Media, managing a portfolio of over 100 magazine titles. It was this wor...

Welcome to Episode 14 of the Out of Office podcast, recorded in January 2024 with Karl Wells as we walked along the West Side Highway in Manhattan towards Chelsea Piers.  Karl and I were colleagues many years ago at News UK before he headed over to New York to work at the Wall Street Journal. He spent a number of years there heading up subscriptions before joining The Information a couple of...

Welcome to episode 13 of the Out of Office podcast. In this episode I take a stroll around Central Park with Ariscielle Novicio, a News Corp colleague of mine from many years ago and now CTO at New York Post. We reminisce about two sister projects we worked on back in 2010 that were both designed to change the face of news media. While mine didn't see the light of day, Ariscielle's, The Daily, did...

Welcome to episode 12 of the Out of Office podcast. In this episode I chat with Kerin O’Connor, publisher and subsequent CEO of The Week - an amazing business that’s very close to our hearts here at Pugpig as our first ever app we launched together with Kerin and his team back in 2011. We walked around Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens and talked about Kerin’s time at Dennis Publishing, how they bu...

Welcome to Episode 11 of the Out of Office podcast, which I recorded in the summer of 2021 with Alan Hunter, former head of digital for The Times and The Sunday Times, where we walked around Alexandra Palace and talked about Alan’s days at News UK - his shift from journalist to digital guru, how print and digital have converged over recent years and how to build a world class digital news media te...

Welcome to Episode 10 of the Out of Office podcast, which I recorded with Matt Kelly, the founder of The New European, and which is the second of two bite sized chunks. In this first part (episode 9), we talked about Matt’s earlier days as a regional newspaper journalist, his views on the news media in general, his time at Archant, and the birth of The New European. In this second part, he takes u...

Welcome to Episode 9 of the Out of Office podcast, which I recorded with Matt Kelly, the founder of The New European, and which I've split into two bite sized chunks. In this first part, we talk about Matt’s earlier days as a regional newspaper journalist, his views on the news media in general, his time at Archant, and the birth of The New European. In the second part (episode 10), he takes us th...

Welcome to Episode 8 of the Out of Office podcast, which I recorded with Justin Pearse in early January 2021 Justin Pearse is first and foremost a writer, and currently the editor of new digital age (after having spent a number of years also editor of new media age, and soon to be launching e-commerce age). In between all that Justin was heading up branded content at The Drum and Digiday - so he’s...

Welcome to Episode 7 of the Out of Office podcast, which I recorded with Esther Kezia Thorpe in June 2020 At the time of recording, Esther had recently left her role at Dennis publishing so that she could commit herself fully to her own consulting business and also to the ever growing media voices empire which now includes a daily media roundup newsletter, an annual podcast awards event and of cou...

Welcome to Episode 6 of the Out of Office podcast, which I recorded with James Hewes, the President and CEO at FIPP (the international network for global media) a few months ago when we were all in lockdown. We chatted about the future of consumer magazine businesses and how the need to diversify is becoming ever more important. We also touched on live events and how they can survive in a world wh...

Welcome to Episode 5 of the Out of Office podcast, which covers the second of a two part conversation that I had with Katie Vanneck-Smith, ex-President of The Wall Street Journal and co-founder of Tortoise Media. Katie and I took a long walk in the fields of the South Downs near her home in Slindon, where, after chatting about her career at News Corp (see part 1), we covered the inception of Torto...

Welcome to Episode 4 of the Out of Office podcast, which covers the first of a two part conversation that I had with Katie Vanneck-Smith, ex-President of The Wall Street Journal and co-founder of Tortoise Media. Katie and I took a walk in the fields of the South Downs near her home in Slindon, where we started by talking about her career at News Corp from her early days at The Times to her move to...

Welcome to Episode 3 of the Out of Office podcast, with my third guest Syd Nadim , the founder and chairman of Clock digital agency, inventor of Swipe Station (a food and drink purchasing platform for sports and entertainment venues which may well do very well indeed as we come out of lockdown) and a good friend of mine. Syd and I took a lovely sunny walk along the Grand Union Canal from his offic...

Welcome to Episode 2 of the Out of Office podcast, with my second guest Alison Dolan , who was at the time of recording, the Chief Strategy Officer of News UK, the UK arm of Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation. Alison and I had planned to walk through Richmond Park, a stone's throw from her West London home, but global lockdown got in the way and so instead we spoke from our respective living rooms,...

Here we are at last! Welcome to Episode 1 of the Out of Office podcast, with a perfect first guest - Barry McIlheney , CEO of the PPA, ex-editor of Smash Hits and Empire Magazine and all round good egg. Barry and I go for a walk in Clissold Park where he dazzles me with stories of how he went from his first job as a librarian to editing some of the biggest and most influential magazines titles of...