Times deputy head of digital Anna Sbuttoni, Times homepage on 7 April 2026, and Times story ‘The day coal died’
The Times says a strategy of publishing “fewer, better stories” has led to three consecutive months of record-breaking global audience growth.
The Times news desk has reduced the number of stories it publishes by 20% since the mindset change while the sports desk cut its output by 30%.
But deputy head of digital Anna Sbuttoni said “they didn’t lose any audience. In fact, they gained it.”
Across the whole newsroom, The Times has gone from publishing more than 200 stories a day to about 150 – a 25% cut.
This was not a cost-cutting exercise, Sbuttoni said, with staff levels remaining neutral.
She added: “We’ve had three consecutive months of all-time, record-breaking audience growth at The Times,” referring to internal global traffic figures for the website and app (excluding Apple News), “and we’re publishing fewer stories than we ever have.”
Sbuttoni said organic search traffic to the website was up 29% year on year and 13% month on month in February, bucking the industry trend.
Google Discover traffic was up more than 150% year on year and social referral traffic was up more than 100%, she added.
The “fewer, better stories” strategy has five priorities, according to Sbuttoni, who said it was “a real change in mindset”.
The first priority is “exclusive, original reporting that you can’t get anywhere else”.
Sbuttoni said one of the biggest changes was letting reporters know they did not “have to file every spit and cough of a story” and that they could “take the time to work on something that’s really high value”.
She highlighted a 2024 piece about the end of 142 years of coal in Britain , which she said environment editor Adam Vaughan may previously have filed as a quick one-fact story. Instead, Sbuttoni said, it was “prepared in a really impactful visual style, lots of archive imagery, lots of great reporting”. It was rewarded by being the most-read piece on the website with a “big audience” on Apple News.
The second strand of the strategy is “telling big developing stories as they happen”, for example via live blogs, which have become an increasingly important part of the output at The Times, alongside accompanying content such as explainers, timelines or profiles.
The third, Sbuttoni said, is “how can we add value and make a story distinct to The Times, even if it’s already out there or broken by a competitor?”
Another is using data to keep pace with interest in a long-running story, to check the audience is still engaged and what exactly they want from it “rather than just trying to fill print pages”.
The Times launched a new analytics tool called TED (Times Editorial Data) which was able to show when a story was in the “red zone”.
“It’s just about being data informed,” Sbuttoni said. “Editorial judgement is still really important in this mix. But actually, when you do look closely, there were loads of things we could learn, so not just what we were publishing, but how we were publishing it, how we were telling the story, when we were publishing, all of those questions.”
The “last piece of the puzzle”, Sbuttoni said, is making it clear to the reader “why they should click” through based on the headline, image and standfirst.
These must answer the question: “Why is the story worth subscribing for and what’s the value it’s going to give you?”
The Times (including the Times Literary Supplement or TLS) now has 659,000 digital subscribers , up 7% in the past year.
Publishers Audience Measurement Company (Pamco) data published in March showed The Times had a total brand reach in the UK of more than 12.5 million per month, with 10.5 million digitally.
In the year to 29 June 2025, Times Media grew revenue by 2% to £390.7m, attributed to digital subscriber increases and enhanced online advertising experiences narrowly offsetting print declines. Pre-tax profit was up 13% to £69.2m.
Quarter of Times stories being read by less than 2,000 people before ‘fewer, better stories’ strategy began
The content strategy began about two years ago with a full audit of the stories being produced by the news desk.
Sbuttoni said they realised a quarter of stories were being read by less than 2,000 subscribers or guest visitors.
Many of these stories were “incremental stories you could get anywhere else”, Sbuttoni said, which were often “one-fact stories”.
Sbuttoni worked with the head of news and live news editors to look at what was being published on a daily basis and they “decided to essentially stop publishing those”.
Audience growth at The Times has also been helped by a switch to a .com website URL in 2024 and a lot of technical SEO work in the background.
The Times has pivoted towards putting its journalists “front and centre” on social media, Sbuttoni said, “putting their face and their name on it and showing the value of what we do and what it really takes to report some of these stories”.
A video of chief reporter Fiona Hamilton explaining the case of a UCL student whose “date-rape” drug death the Met Police are accused of botching had more than one million views off platform and generated subscriber sign-ups, Sbuttoni said. The article was also well-read among subscribers and guest visitors. “You can see how that social video gives it the extra projection,” she added.
Since 2016 The Times had followed an edition-based publishing model online in which stories were published at 9am, 12pm, 5pm and midnight rather than whenever they were ready throughout the day.
Sbuttoni said they decided to “radically move away from midnight publishing”.
This means that Times stories are now more likely to go out online before they are in the print paper. Saturday interviews, for example, are now staggered through the week as it would be much harder for one reader to digest them all online in one day. This means each piece can be more prominent on the website and be given more promotional support.
Sbuttoni said it is important to make sure a story “lands with impact, with audience support, with marketing support, a promotional plan”. This is only possible under the new approach “because it’s really making the most of the resources we have”.
The Times is also still committed to “really important” campaigns such as British Journalism Award-winning Clean It Up (about sewage pollution in UK waterways) regardless of what the data dashboard says. Sbuttoni said: “This is not just a numbers game. Editorial judgment is part of this every step of the way.”
Times North Star goal is daily habit
Sbuttoni said the new strategy also helps The Times off platform on distributors like Apple News because “these are the things that are really worth paying for. They are just so distinctive.
“It’s really competitive out there so I think we just need to make it really clear when we have something special and different, and make sure that we keep bringing the exclusives, scoops, these more elevated ways of telling the stories.”
The whole Times business, from editorial to marketing and product, has now taken on daily habit as their North Star goal.
Sbuttoni said this “incentivises quality. It’s about encouraging our subscribers to come back to the site, and quality is really at the heart of that.”
Moving Times subscribers into the app (which is currently used by 70% of them) is key for retaining them and creating a direct relationship via tools like push alerts and newsletters, she added.
Pamco figures published in March showed users in the UK spend an average of eight hours and 55 minutes reading content on the Times app per month.
New community features are also being created, led by new head of community Rachel Duffy who has joined from a similar role at The Telegraph. Sbuttoni said the aim is to “make sure that subscribers feel like they really belong to The Times”.
Other upcoming product improvements include a new live blog template, bringing video more prominently into the app and article narration so users can either read or listen.
Sbuttoni also highlighted the launch of Times Money last year , with new personal finance content and tools, as a “real subscription driver”, second only to the UK news section. Subscriber reads of money articles have doubled since the revamped section started, she added.
Another change last year was to give subscribers up to three “bonus accounts” at no extra cost to share with friends and family, creating a barrier to cancelling.
Sbuttoni said The Times now has more than 100,000 bonus users who skew younger and more female than the main subscriber base, giving the newsroom a chance to build a direct relationship with new audiences.
Email [email protected] to point out mistakes, provide story tips or send in a letter for publication on our “Letters Page” blog