Good morning and welcome to your daily Press Gazette media briefing on Tuesday 4 February, brought to you in partnership with On The Record, the campaign dedicated to establishing the UK’s first national memorial to UK-based reporting teams who gather news from conflict zones. Be part of their story by donating today.

Some 12 years after The Sun last tried to launch a paywall, the UK tabloid is going to start charging for some online content.

It follows a similar move by Mail Online last year and the revelation last week that Sky News will be following suit.

At £1.99 per month The Sun is starting with a low entry price for access to The Sun Club (the print edition costs £1.10 per day).

The backdrop is falling website traffic (apparently in response to algorithm changes) and print circulation sinking ever downwards which both contributed to hefty losses for the title. Prince Harry's £10m privacy payout won't have helped matters either.

We have the full story here.

Today we also speak to the award-winning team at Mail Online Deep Dive. Forget everything you thought you knew about Mail Online and check out the amazingly immersive and informative blockbuster online articles they are creating.

And we speak to a publisher who is making the purely free online model work. UK-based GRV Media publishes a range of niche sports websites and appears unruffled by algorithm changes.

Founder Vic Daniels told us how he is planning to recruit 100 new staff this year and is targeting overall traffic of two billion page views. For context that would be around the same as The Guardian's UK annual total (per Ipsos iris data).

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On Press Gazette

The Sun launches £1.99 paywall for premium online content

Membership of The Sun Club will also give readers access to print subscriber perks and offers such as Sun Hols for £9.50 and Sun Superdays discounted tickets to theme parks.

Read more

Mail Online becoming home for in-depth multimedia storytelling with Deep Dive strand

Deep Dive is not intended as a revenue-driving part of Mail Online (yet). There are no ads on the pages and they are not paywalled as part of Mail+, which restricts access to a small number of articles on the site each day.

Read more

UK-based sports publisher aims to create 100 new jobs in 2025

Co-founder and executive chairman Vic Daniels told Press Gazette that in January page views were up 51% year on year, turnover from GRV’s publishing business was up 167.1% and pre-tax profits were six times higher than the same month in 2024.

Read more

News in brief

Forbes is planning to cut up to 5% of its total workforce, an unspecified number of employees, after missing its financial goals for 2024. (Press Gazette)

Our tracker is for UK and US journalism industry job cuts. But it's worth noting that Abu Dhabi's The National reportedly laid off 28 journalists, including on its multimedia, digital and foreign desks, last week. (Semafor)

BBC Radio 4 essay series A Point of View will come to an end in April "as part of the BBC's need to make savings", with staff moved to other roles. The BBC says "we have newly created space in the Radio 4 schedule for more detailed original non-fiction" which will have a longer runtime.

The US National Newspaper Association has warned its members that threatened US tariffs on Canadian goods "will have the effect of increasing the cost for newsprint sourced from Canadian mills and will likely result in higher prices for newsprint produced domestically". (National Newspaper Association)

British journalist Gerald Flynn, who works for environmental news outlet Mongabay, has been barred from re-entering Cambodia after living in the country since 2019. The site said it "appears to be retaliation for his journalistic work". (Mongabay)

Also on Press Gazette:

• Digital advertising and cost cuts fuel growing profits at Mail titles

• Nine reasons why Mirror journalists think page-view targets are wrong

• Will Hayward says quitting Wales Online to launch Substack was financial ‘no-brainer’

• Major job cuts at Mail titles in final stage of digital-first transition

• ‘It’s nice to feel wanted’ – Sun reporter defiant after Russian arrest warrant issued

• Online publishing revenue trends: Audio rising, video stalls, data is golden

• Channel 4 chief says Gen Z media habits causing ‘immense issues’