‘We’ve got our recipe and we’re excited to bring it to London’: Broadsheet Media founder on global expansion plans
Broadsheet Media is set to launch in London later this year, and founder Nick Shelton has shared why the independent publisher is ready to go global.
Broadsheet — a city guide and lifestyle publication founded by Shelton 15 years ago — reported a monthly audience of 2.5m people in a 2022 submission to government. Shelton told Mumbrella the business was “in great shape” and it was time to expand.
“I’ve got a really terrific management team, including a managing director, here in Australia, and I feel really comfortable with the way the business is running,” Shelton explained.
Shelton with Broadsheet’s managing director Sian Whitaker
Having explored different expansion plans — including opportunities in Australia — he said London stood out as one of the “most exciting cultural centres of the world right now”, that doesn’t have the media attention it deserves.
Time Out – which once upon a time was the leading cultural publication in the UK – is in retreat, he said, describing it as a “shadow” now, while the Evening Standard — another once-market-leader — has gone from daily publication to weekly.
“There’s an opportunity there,” he continued. “Those titles have often covered London well, but there’s nothing quite like Broadsheet. People often say, ‘I wish there was a Broadsheet there’.”
While he acknowledged that the UK has a similar culture and media sensibility to Australia, he stressed the importance of finding local London experts to kick start the publisher’s efforts – including the current search for a London editor.
“London has a very competitive media market generally… We know we’re going to have to adjust to the market, we’re under no illusion that we can just take exactly what we do in Australia and do it in London,” he admitted.
“It’s important we speak to the market and the way it works, and part of that is hiring lots of locals who knows the market well.”
On the flip side however, he stressed the Broadsheet ‘DNA’ will remain the same: “I’m going to go over and spend a lot of time there, we know we need to take this seriously. We’re not going to reinvent the wheel when we get over there… we’re going to have to import our DNA across.
“We’ve got our recipe and we’re excited to bring it to London.”
Shelton teased an officially September launch, with some potential for “activity” in the coming months.
He also teased the potential of a future European launch: “We also see [this as] a springboard into Europe, once we get London right, it becomes Paris, and Berlin, and Milan, and Amsterdam, and Copenhagen. It gets really exciting.”
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