About

The Subscriptions Town Hall by the International News Media Association (INMA) represents a report card to members of the news industry we serve about what our network has learned in 2024 about the hottest subjects in news media.

The Town Hall is based on the learnings distilled by Greg Piechota, researcher-in-residence for INMA and the association’s lead for the Readers First Initiative. His engagements with members, experts, and influencers is second to none in the news industry, and the Town Hall aims to spotlight the key learnings from the past year.

The Readers First Initiative surfaces global best practices in the art and science behind digital subscriptions for news media companies and creates a road map toward the next generation of consumer monetisation.

Founded in 2018, the 6-year-old Readers First Initiative has helped transform the news industry’s understanding of subscriptions amid an evolving business model. INMA members tell us the Readers First Initiative shrinks the runway of launching and evolving.

Most of the Readers First Initiative deliverables for INMA members centre on a subscription summit and study tour, master classes on acquisition and retention, a subscription benchmark service, newsletters, blogs, a Slack channel, Webinars, Ask Me Anything sessions with corporate members, reports, workshops, and keynote speeches. Greg has become one of the most sought-after voices in news media on the subject of subscriptions.

In 2024 alone, Greg has engaged with members 200+ times, including visiting 50+ companies around the world. A report titled “There Is No Subscriptions Ceiling for News Media” put bones of a popular keynote presented at the New York Media Subscriptions Summit.

INMA’s growing Subscriptions Benchmark Service now has more than 240+ brands providing unprecedented insights for its customers and the Readers First Initiative.

Heading the Readers First Initiative for INMA is Greg Piechota, a researcher at Oxford and Harvard universities, a long-time journalist and executive at Poland’s Gazeta Wyborcza, and a former member of the INMA Board of Directors. During his time at Oxford and Harvard, he studied technology-enabled disruption patterns across industries and business model innovation in news media, and is considered one of the world’s foremost experts on the subject. Greg serves on boards of non-profits, publishing groups, and e-commerce companies in the United Kingdom, Germany, and Ukraine, including the Bureau of Investigative Journalism in London. His book, Unlocking the Customer Value Chain, written with Thales Teixeira of Harvard Business School, was published in 2019.