Hello from the team at Press Gazette on Tuesday, 13 January. Here’s our daily round-up of media news.

🎸 It’s a long way to the top if you want to rock and roll.

Which can involve getting ripped off and underpaid, as the AC/DC song goes. These are sentiments contributors to the magazine and website for heavy metal aficionados Kerrang will have related to just before Christmas.

The title’s owners sought to change payment terms from 30 days to 60 days for contributors. But 16 freelances channelled their inner Peter Grant (Led Zeppelin’s famously shrewd and ruthless manager) when they threatened unofficial strike action in protest at the move.

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📺 Is GB News Britain’s most popular TV news channel? It depends on the metric you are using, but at any given time there are likely to be more people watching it than there are tuned into the BBC News Channel or Sky News.

The average number of viewers tuning into GB News at any one time in December was 87,700 versus 74,500 for the BBC News Channel and 58,300 for Sky News. It’s a stat which GB News says it has won throughout the second half of 2025.

The BBC and Sky News still win comfortably for overall reach across the month and in terms of online metrics. But this remains an immense achievement for a channel which only launched in June 2021.

While other UK TV news broadcasters sell themselves on objectivity and fairness, GB News has a particular point of view. It’s anti-woke, believes Britain is “broken” and wears its heart on its sleeve when it comes to concerns about immigration.

GB News sails close to the wind when it comes to Ofcom’s rules governing impartiality but while there have been numerous individual breaches of the code, the one big fine levied against the channel was successfully challenged in court.

The biggest challenge facing GB News is not regulation but profitability, having lost more than £100m for owners Sir Paul Marshall and Dubai-based investment group Legatum since launch.

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📉 And the final tally of tracked news media job cuts in the UK and US for 2025 is in. Just looking at reported job cuts more than 3,400 jobs have gone (compared with 3,900 in 2024).

But given these are just the redundancies we know about, the real figure will be much higher.

The biggest cutbacks have come at ad-funded news organisations with big legacy print businesses such as People Inc in the US (with 369 jobs gone) and Reach in the UK (with around 240 roles cut). Online native news brand Business Insider also took a big hit with 150 jobs gone.

Advertising spend is actually growing healthily in the UK and US but most of that new money is going to Alphabet, Meta and Tiktok.

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🤏News In Brief

The BBC is to file a motion to dismiss over Donald Trump's Panorama lawsuit, arguing it lacks "personal jurisdiction", the Florida court is "improper" and Trump has "failed to state a claim". (BBC)

Dan Wakeford has departed as Us Weekly editor-in-chief after almost two years, saying he is "proud of my achievements in modernising the brand, restoring its relevance and authority and expanding its reach through vertical video and new subject areas". (