DP25026 Digital Publisher - RELX V01 241025

 AI buzz provides a big wake-up call

Buy, sell or hold: today’s best share tips

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Emma Powell - Tempus 

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RELX
Market cap £64 billion 
9-month revenue growth 7%

It takes a lot to jolt the sleeping giant that is Relx. The data specialist has quietly ascended to become one of London’s ten most valuable companies, with a market cap of more than £60 billion.

However, questions over whether the rise of generative artificial intelligence threatens to upend the group’s core business, selling information and analytics to professionals in the legal, insurance and medical industries, among others, have sparked a rare sell-off in the shares.

The shares have fallen about 15 per cent over the past six months, although that doesn’t make them cheap by conventional standards, still trading at roughly 25 times forward earnings, but that multiple is down from about 30 in April.

Yet Relx’s premium status is deserved. It has established a long record of stable revenue, margin improvement and sturdy cash generation. Charging customers a subscription fee for the use of its hefty legal, medical and scientific journals means a chunk of its revenue is recurring. Despite the recent headwind, the shares have risen 197 per cent over the past decade, easily outpacing the 51 per cent return generated by the FTSE 100.

The company makes relatively few headlines, and Erik Engstrom, the Swede who has led the business for the past 15 years, has never given a media interview as its chief executive.

Known as Reed Elsevier from 1992 until 2015, it was once a producer of books and magazines but has made a gradual transition away from physical media, selling one of its last print magazines in 2019. It now generates 83 per cent of its revenue through digital means, with face-to-face exhibitions accounting for 14 per cent and print just 4 per cent. Relx now has four divisions: scientific, technical and medical (otherwise known as “STM”); risk; legal; and exhibitions.

In the debate over whether the emergence of ChatGPT and other chatbots will make Relx’s information and analytics tools redundant, the group seems to be winning.

The risk division, which covers the company’s analytics and decision tools for areas such as digital fraud and identity checks that are mission critical for the banks and insurance companies that use them, has long used so-called extractive AI. Those products use machine learning to extract and analyse key bits of information, and were credited for helping kick the business’s underlying revenue growth, which stood at 8 per cent over the first nine months of the year.

However, it has extended its use of AI to its legal and STM businesses, which has driven an improvement in top line performance for both divisions. While its revenue growth has not shot the lights out, adding value through generative AI has pushed it to a rate of 9 per cent, from 2 per cent in 2019. Likewise, STM has improved to 5 per cent from 1 per cent over the same timeframe.

Within the mix, exhibitions may look out of place, not least because it carries more risk that a macroeconomic slump could hit revenues. However, there are no plans to sell it.

Covid hit aside, the business, whose trade shows range from Comic Con to the London Book Fair across 25 countries, has generated respectable top line growth. Over the first nine months of the year, underlying revenue rose 8 per cent, but over the last decade it has fluctuated to a greater extent than Relx’s other three arms.

One of the core tenets of Engstrom’s strategy is to keep a tight enough handle on operating costs that revenue growth outpaces it each year. The result has been consistent margin expansion, which stood at almost 35 per cent over the first six months of the year, compared with just under 32 per cent in 2019.

Its fiscal discipline extends to the way it uses its cash. It has eschewed large-scale M&A in favour of bolt-on deals that may give an edge to its products. Instead most of its cash is invested back into developing its existing technology, and then funding the dividend and potentially share buybacks.

Relx’s record of steady compound returns seems like it can withstand the AI noise.

ADVICE Buy 
WHY Share price weakness is an opportunity

DP25025 Interesting Author - Gillian Tindall V01 231025

 Gillian Tindall appears to have been motivated to write by some of the same things that motivate me. The development of old villages historically.

Gillian Tindall

Historian and novelist whose works traversing fiction, architecture and biography showed how the past influences the present

Gillian Tindall

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The unfolding of history from mundane phenomena — a modest house or street, a surviving cache of letters — was the distinctive gift of the historian and novelist Gillian Tindall, illuminating ordinary lives with scholarly rigour and sympathetic imagination. In addition to these pioneering works of “micro-history”, her oeuvre ranged from novels, short stories and essays to biography, radio plays and even a study of Bombay’s history and architecture.

Born in London in 1938, Gillian Elizabeth Tindall was the daughter of Dennis Tindall, a medical publisher, and the novelist Ursula Orange. Her childhood was unhappy. In Three Houses, Many Lives, she described her hated boarding school, Manor House School in Limpsfield, Surrey. Visiting long afterwards, it still filled her with “a miasma of sickly dread”. Her mother committed suicide when she was 17, an act Tindall found hard to forgive, both for herself and for her devastated younger brother.

As a precocious teenager, she spent liberating months in Paris before reading English at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, graduating with a first-class honours degree. It was the acceptance for publication of her first novel, while she was still an undergraduate, that persuaded her to become a writer rather than a lecturer. As a historian her breakthrough came in 1977 with the publication of The Fields Beneath: The History of One London Village, an in-depth study of the district of Kentish Town in north London. Thirteen years earlier, she had moved there with her husband Richard Lansdown, a distinguished psychologist, and bought a two-storey house in one of its oldest terraces, which was to be their home for more than 60 years until her death.

The Fields Beneath encapsulates Tindall’s way of seeing urban landscape as a palimpsest. Its appearance, in her erudite and lucid revelation, had been shaped not only by Victorian development, by the railways and even the chances of war, but by older geographies of vanished waterways and drovers’ tracks: she called the area “disguised countryside”.

Another of Tindall’s abiding fascinations was France. Paris was the setting for an early novel, Fly away Home, which won the Somerset Maugham Award, and for a book haunted by her ancestors, Footprints in Paris: A Few Streets, a Few Lives. A later, remarkable biography, The Journey of Martin Nadaud (1999), traced the career of a 19th-century French stonemason from revolutionary to exile in England and his eventual return. Characteristically she had chosen to write not about a celebrated figure, but about the rise of a humble artisan from a rural backwater. After its publication she became a Chevalier of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.

In 1973 Tindall and her husband had bought a second house, not a typical holiday home but a village cottage in Chassignolles, in the heart of France. And soon afterwards, while visiting an empty house there, she came upon an abandoned sheaf of letters addressed by different suitors to an innkeeper’s daughter a century and a half earlier. Tindall’s book Célestine: Voices from a French Village, to which these letters gave birth, was one of her most successful: the evocation of a rural France on the brink of transformation.

Assiduous local research, a deep knowledge of French history and a gift for scrupulous reconstruction gave the work a vivid immediacy.

For many years Tindall and her husband amassed material and photographs of 1960s London, and she became a valued voice on the conservation committee of the London and Middlesex Archaeological Society. “Directly and indirectly,” ran a recent article in the journal of the Royal Institute of British Architects, her “book [The Fields Beneath] has helped forge a way of seeing cities and places that is integral to most practising architects’ education”.

Tindall’s study of a single Bankside house built in about 1710, A House by the Thames, delved back into its succession of varied occupants, wealthy and very poor. Her other books include a study of memory, partly personal, The Pulse Glass and the Beat of other Hearts, about the evocative power of leftover objects.

Her works were often concerned with the influence of the past on the present, and the complexity of memory.

The memory of Tindall herself evokes a woman of unswerving integrity. She was blunt in dispelling pretension and stupidity, but her friendships were loyal and lasting. She is survived by Richard, her husband of 62 years, and their son Harry, a television producer. Not least, in its conviction that the death of the past impoverishes the present, she bequeaths a body of work that bears the stamp of a unique mind and sensibility.

Gillian Tindall, historian and novelist, was born on May 4, 1938. She died on October 1, 2025, aged 87 

DP25024 Social Media superceding Books V01 121025

 

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The Sunday Times has today launched a campaign to Get Britain Reading after new data showed that people of all ages now read social media posts more often than books.

Among younger British adults, printed books have dropped out of the top three most popular reading formats, falling below subtitles and digital articles.

Decades of research shows that reading for fun can transform lives. It boosts children’s and adults’ mental health and has been found to be more important for a child’s cognitive development between the ages of 10 and 16 than their parents’ level of education.

Yet the proportion of children who never read for enjoyment is rising across every age bracket, according to the National Literacy Trust. One in five children aged 11 to 13 never pick up a book voluntarily and parents are reading less frequently to their children.

One in ten children (9.8 per cent) aged 5 to 18 surveyed by the National Literacy Trust do not have a book of their own.

Secondary school heads say many 11-year-olds arrive in Year 7 still in the early stages of learning to read. The problem affects up to 150,000 children a year in England. The crisis is also hitting our universities. This month it emerged that experts were teaching English literature undergraduates how to concentrate long enough to read lengthy novels. Academics said the students had grown up with phones and often felt intimidated.

With our Get Britain Reading campaign you can: 
● Donate to Bookbanks to put books in the hands of those most in need
● Volunteer to read in schools with Coram Beanstalk 
● Above all, take our pledge to read for pleasure for at least ten minutes a day for the next six weeks

The leading figures supporting our campaign include Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Salman Rushdie, Jamie Oliver, Michael Morpurgo, JK Rowling, Nick Cave, David Nicholls, Jacqueline Wilson, Katherine Rundell, Philip Pullman, Simon Armitage, Robert Harris, Ian McEwan, Anne Fine, Marian Keyes, Quentin Blake and Dolly Alderton.

The scale of the challenge has prompted the government to declare 2026 the National Year of Reading. Bridget Phillipson, the education secretary, said: “It’s incredibly important that children have the chance to read for pleasure, develop a love of reading, because those habits that you build up as a child stay with you for the rest of your life.”

British adults across all age categories are now more likely to read social media posts than any other reading format, according to a report funded by Arts Council England. The survey of 4,000 UK adults by The Reading Agency, a charity, found that subtitles were the second most commonly read format for under- 35s. Print books featured in the top three for those aged 35 and over, as well as either digital articles or print media.

Adults spend eight full days and nights a year reading social media posts, compared with six days reading a book. They were far more likely to “very much enjoy” reading print books than social media (45 per cent versus 23 per cent).

The benefits of taking time out to read in any format are stark. The report found that those who read regularly are 45 per cent more likely to report sleeping well, 58 per cent more likely to report feeling generally happy, 35 per cent more likely to say they do not feel lonely and 32 per cent more likely to say they do not feel anxious or depressed, than non-readers.

We are asking for donations from readers to Bookbanks, a charity that gives away books at food banks. Emily Rhodes,its founder, said: “We see a real hunger for books. Books can take readers on many extraordinary journeys — one of these could well be a journey out of poverty. We are so grateful to The Sunday Times and its readers for helping us raise the funds to reach more of the 2.4 million people accessing food banks in the UK.”

The demise of regular reading among adults is affecting how much parents read to their children. A report by HarperCollins found less than half (41 per cent) of under fives are read to frequently, a steep fall from 64 per cent in 2012. Parents also read less to their sons than their daughters. Only 29 per cent of boys under three are read to every day or nearly every day, compared with 44 per cent of girls.

Coram Beanstalk needs readers’ help to pass on their love of reading to children by volunteering across Britain’s schools. Amy Lewis, head of Coram Beanstalk, said that all children deserved someone to help them build on the skills they learn in school so they can discover the “immersive” enjoyment of books.

Laura Trott, shadow education secretary, said: “On my way to work every morning, it’s hard not to notice adults and children sitting side by side, not talking, not reading, just heads down, faces lit by phone screens. We’re losing the ability to concentrate, to think deeply, and the joy of getting lost in another world ... That’s why The Sunday Times’ Get Britain Reading campaign is so important, and why I’ve pushed so hard to get smartphones out of schools.”

DP25023 Founder of Spotify taking a back seat. V01 011025

 

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg with Spotify’s Daniel Ek, rapper Snoop Dogg and Napster co-founder Sean Parker

Daniel Ek, the founder of Spotify, is stepping back from day-to-day running of the streaming giant to focus on longterm strategy and pursue his ambition to create more “super-companies”.

Ek, 42, will move to the role of executive chairman in January, with Spotify executives Gustav Soderstrom and Alex Norstrom jointly taking over the chief executive position.

In a memo to employees, Ek said: “Why now? Because Alex and Gustav have clearly demonstrated that, with the support of this remarkable team, they are ready to lead Spotify as co- CEOs. And because you all have stepped up, I can confidently step back from the day-to-day.” He said he intended to “help create more of these super-companies, ones that are developing new technologies to tackle some of the biggest challenges of our time”.

Spotify Technology’s shares, which have gained 63 per cent this year, closed down $30.69, or 4.2 per cent, at $697.78 in New York last night.

Ek was still in his early twenties when he founded Spotify in Sweden in 2006. He has built it into a streaming giant with a market valuation of $144 billion.

As executive chairman, Ek will focus on capital allocation and long-term strategy in what the company called a European-style chairman role. He has a net worth of $9.8 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

Spotify, which has nearly 700 million monthly users, receives a monthly subscription fee for ad-free listening from half its customers. It reported its first annual profit in 2024 after a series of price increases and cost-cutting efforts.

Global revenue from recorded music rose 4.8 per cent to $29.6 billion in 2024. Streaming exceeded $20 billion for the first time and subscription streaming accounted for more than half of it, according to IFPI’s Global Music Report.

Soderstrom, currently chief product and technology officer, oversees global tech strategy and product development, while Norstrom, as chief business officer, manages subscriber and advertising businesses along with music, podcast and audiobook operations.

They will report to Ek, who also serves on the board.

DP25022 New eBook Platform. V01 011025

 Ebook rival to Amazon 

Amazon’s ebook monopoly is being challenged by an online bookshop that allows brick and mortar shops to make money from the digital books it sells. Bookshop.org’s ebook platform launches today with more than a million titles and lets buyers nominate a bookshop to receive a cut of sales. Amazon is refusing to allow the ebooks onto its Kindles.

DP25021 Publisher verse AI Copyright Case V01 150925

 Rolling Stone owner sues Google over AI summaries

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Helen Cahill

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The owner of Rolling Stone magazine is suing Google for illegally using its journalism to create summaries of stories for its search engine.

Penske Media, which also owns the magazines Variety and Billboard, said that by providing users with brief outlines of information, Google had reduced the number of people clicking through to its websites.

Google has been using artificial intelligence to scrape data from publishers’ websites and create versions of their content for what it calls “AI overviews”. The summaries allow users to see content on the Google search page, rather than clicking through to another site.

In its lawsuit, Penske said: “We have a responsibility to proactively fight for the future of digital media and preserve its integrity, all of which is threatened by Google’s current actions.”

Jose Castaneda, a spokesman for Google, said the company would “defend against these meritless claims”. He added: “With AI overviews, people find search more helpful and use it more, creating new opportunities for content to be discovered. Every day Google sends billions of clicks to sites across the web and AI overviews send traffic to a greater diversity of sites.”

DMG Media, the owner of brands including MailOnline and Metro, has said AI overviews led to a drop in referrals to its websites of 89 per cent. The publisher told the Competition and Markets Authority that Google’s summaries were “carefully constructed” to ensure “the user has no reason to read any further” than the search page.

Douglas McCabe of Enders Analysis said in a report this year that companies’ content was being “used but not rewarded”, adding: “Many publishers have used their websites to replicate the article format but the website itself is no longer the primary destination for consumers as it struggles to meet expectations, while AI erodes monetisation.”

DP25020 Writing my first book. Esther Walker V01 090925

 Copyright The Times (090925)

Esther Walker

It took me a decade to get a book published.

“But you’re already a writer,” people say when I confess this. “Why did it take so long?”

I tell them it’s because publishing fiction is very difficult. And that just because you’re a journalist doesn’t mean you’re any good at writing novels. And also! It is a crowded market! Publishers are increasingly picky! So it wasn’t me, it was them.

But I now admit that it may also have been me. I possibly made some mistakes along the way, which delayed things a bit. Sometimes I stare out of the window, drum my fingers and make a mental list of all the things I wish I’d known before I had so much as opened a Word document and written “Chapter One”.

Here is that list.

1 Understand this key fact: no one wants your novel
It’s not personal. The invention of modern word processing and email has made writing and submitting a novel very easy. And the extraordinary success of writers such as JK Rowling and Lee Child has made people think that simply publishing any old novel means total life satisfaction plus loads of money. Lockdown turbocharged this. Therefore, everyone who works in publishing lives in a state of terror at the avalanche of unsolicited fiction manuscripts billowing through their laptops. Know this: they are not excited. They’re not drumming their fingers on their desk thinking: “When, oh when will someone send me a debut fiction manuscript?” They’re wondering if it’s OK to just Ctrl+A+Del their entire inbox. Some agents write on their websites: “Unsolicited manuscripts will be deleted, unread.”

2 If you’re still reading this, congratulations!
You’ve passed the first test of any debut novelist, which is to keep going in the face of a total lack of interest in your creative work. Getting fiction published is 90 per cent carrying on despite no financial reward, repeated rejection and the worst of the worst: ghostings. People tell that story about how Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone was rejected by 14 publishers as if that’s a lot of publishers. My first novel was rejected by 28 publishers before finding an editor, and I spentthe decade before that being turned down, not always kindly. I was being told, “No. Go away,” so many times I thought I was going to go mad. And then I wondered if I’d actually gone mad, and that’s why I kept writing fiction that no one wanted.

My first novel was rejected by 28 publishers

3 You have no idea how to write a novel, and that’s fine 
This is the big one. I spent probably six of those ten years in the wilderness hacking away at fiction, wondering why it didn’t “work”. Answer: because writing fiction is not instinctive, like sneezing, it’s a thing you have to learn to do, like driving. You need to know how to make a novel work before you start writing or you’ll hit a brick wall at 30,000 words or 50,000 words. The good news is that expensive creative writing courses are not the only answer. Only do one of these if you are accepted onto a famous one, such as NYU, Curtis Brown, Faber, Goldsmiths or that one at East Anglia that Ian McEwan made famous. Be very wary of others, which are often run by failed novelists turned sadists.

You can learn everything about novel-writing from how-to books. It’s not cheating. There are rules to writing fiction and you need to know what they are, even if you choose to ignore them. The best novelists, from John Steinbeck to Donna Tartt, are the ones who most deftly disguise the classic fiction framework their work hangs on. Go on Amazon and pick at least three how-to-write-a-novel books, then read them all and take notes.

Huge advances can be a curse: the pressure to sell your book rockets to dizzying heights

4 Be extremely careful who you show your work-in-progress to 
Your friends and family will not tell you the truth, because they’re not stupid. Are they really going to tell you what you’ve written is drivel? They also, by the way, have no idea (unless your brother-in-law is Richard Osman) what agents are looking for. You need to exercise caution when it comes to who you tell you’re writing a novel. People you’d normally consider to be friends can be surprisingly unsupportive: they may find it pretentious or threatening. You don’t need that negative energy.

5 You’ll have to write at least one complete manuscript that never goes anywhere
I think JoJo Moyes wrote two. I have written three novels that will never be read by anyone. That’s 240,000 words that will languish in darkness — and that’s not counting huge sections of my published novel that were discarded because of rewrites. It isquite normal for the work that you finally manage to sell to be the one where you thought: “If this one doesn’t work, I’m giving up.” If you can’t cope with that prospect then please, do not be a novelist. Live a happy life doing something else.

6 There’s no money in writing fiction 
A £4,000 advance for debut fiction is common, and 15 per cent of that will go to your agent. But don’t despair, because huge advances can be a curse: the pressure to sell your book rockets to dizzying heights and everyone will know you had a massive advance and be snippy about it. A tiny fraction of novelists make a profit and the rest of us do it because we’re unable to stop. It feels like a punishment dished out by ancient gods: cursed endlessly to write fiction that gets so-so reviews and sells 423 copies.

7 There is no praise in fiction writing
If you are writing a novel with the expectation of praise, stop right there, amigo. You will never, ever get the praise you want, or think you are owed. Or even genuinely deserve! If some praise does come along, it won’t be enough, or you will think, they are just being polite. When you submit your novel, no editor will say, “Wow, you wrote an actual whole novel, that’s amazing!” because this is the eighth debut novel they’ve seen before lunch.

There will be many polite brush-offs. (“I’m sure I’ll be kicking myself when this is a bestseller!”) There will also be cruel knock-backs, eg “I couldn’t get past page three.” If you actually get published, God help you. People are never more cruel than when sticking it to a book they didn’t enjoy. The only motivation to write fiction ought to be because you can’t not. See point six.

8 Write a fashionable book 
Write the most fashionable, trendy book you personally possibly can. My debut novel, about a woman who has to look after her niece for a summer, was the most modernsounding book that I could conjure — and that is the one that sold. Whether it’s romantasy, cosy crime or a Colleen Hoover rip-off, go for it. The only caveat is that you need to genuinely enjoy reading those kinds of books. If you try to cynically “bash out” a genre novel it won’t work.

9 Publishing is a business 
The people working in publishing may like to use all sorts of words like “compelling”, “beautiful”, “moving”, but let’s get real: publishing is about money and success. Your feelings, as a writer, are not high on anyone’s list.

If you’re a debut novelist you’re off the priority list entirely and on the floor, being kicked about with all the fag butts and bottle caps. Try not to take it personally. Or at least try not to bear a grudge.

Esther Walker’s debut novel, Well, This Is Awkward (Bedford Square £16.99), will be published on September 11. To order a copy go to timesbookshop.co.uk or call 020 3176 2935. Free UK standard P&P on online orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members