The Week Junior: Ten years of proving the young still read print journalism
As The Week Junior marks its 10th anniversary, editorial director Anna Bassi said the magazine – read mostly by subscribers – is a continuing print success story with its clear communication to a young audience.
She said: “When we launched, I think the idea of producing a magazine in print for kids about news seemed slightly alien – perhaps not the greatest idea at the time.
“But I think there was a kind of a very strong sense that, actually, this was a gap in the market.”
The weekly news and current affairs magazine targets an audience of children aged eight to 14, with Bassi adding “we’re just maybe a slightly smarter older sibling”.
It launched in 2015 with Bassi as editor and a mission to “explain the world in a way that makes sense to kids, in a way that’s age appropriate, that really does prize accuracy”, she said.
The title offers a three-month digital-only subscription with access to the digital edition for £29.99, a print-only subscription for £36.99 and a bundle print-digital subscription for £39.99.
Its monthly Science+Nature magazine launched in 2018, and is sold as a separate print subscription at £44.99 for 13 issues.
It also has a weekly podcast, The Week Junior Show, which gets over 100,000 downloads a week, a weekly newsletter with up to 6,000 subscribers and an app.
The newsletter, written by Bassi, gives parents “a little bit of a hint at what’s included in the magazine”, acting as “an opportunity also to gauge the temperature around certain stories and [if] it’s a particularly contentious or tricky, serious story, perhaps sometimes we’ll get ahead of it”.
The Week Junior also works heavily with the book industry on events, sponsored partnerships and campaigns. It launched its Book Awards three years ago, as well the Summer of Reading Challenge, a campaign that encourages reading.
“It just felt like the obvious next step to have our own book awards, because we were uniquely placed…[with] a direct line to the kids who read those books,” said Bassi. Its publishing partnership with Bloomsbury has seen the publication of five books, which includes guides on politics, the environment, and a quiz book. Its upcoming book, The Week Junior Guide to Money, aims to help young people understand finances.
“I’m always looking for something new to do. But obviously the magazine itself remains absolutely the core business,” said Bassi.
Not an ‘endless doom scroll’
The Week Junior, with an 18-strong editorial team, considers itself to be a print success story in a digital age.
One factor of this success, said Bassi, is its commitment to accuracy – which it ensures with a “six-stage” verification check.
This involves researching widely, going back to original sources, cross-checking, pictures going through a “rigorous process”, and checks being passed onto section editors. Bassi added “asking questions all the time” is also key to this system.
Another “part” of the magazine’s success is people “gifting” it to children, who then “get something through the letterbox every Friday, and it’s got their name on it”, said Bassi. “You can put it down and come back to it, it’s not going to disappear”, she said, like an “endless doom scroll”.
‘The pandemic was absolutely pivotal’
When looking back at the last decade in print, Bassi said: “I think in terms of turning points, there have been many, but in terms of kind of how the editorial side of things has evolved, I’d say the pandemic was absolutely pivotal for us.”
[Read more: ‘Antidote to screen time’: How children’s news magazines have thrived during pandemic]
Lockdown allowed the magazine to discover an editorial theme, which it has continued to this day, of encouraging “readers to perform an act of kindness”. The 10th anniversary issue of the magazine includes a call to action on donating books to less fortunate children.
Having already established a “solutions journalism approach” towards mental health, a wellbeing page was added to the magazine at this time.
“We had to plan everything very quickly when the country went into lockdown, and that made us focus far more closely on how we help kids to feel positive and motivated…when the world had got so much smaller,” said Bassi, adding this was also the advent of the Summer of Reading Challenge – “kids couldn’t go on holiday, but they could read a book”.
Between 2019-2021, the publisher’s paid subscribers increased by 37.2% to 89,700 subscribers, according to ABC data.
This has decreased since: in 2024, The Week Junior had 58,634 paid subscribers, and an average circulation per issue of 65,306 copies.
Despite its circulation and subscriber decline since 2021 (it currently claims to be in mid-single-digit growth for subscriber volume however), it has almost doubled its UK annual subscription price between 2017 to 2024.
[Read more: News magazine ABCs: The Week Junior circulation up by a fifth despite pandemic]
ABC data also shows its 2024 circulation number includes 5,730 copies, many of which are free issues offered when subscribers sign up, as well as copies sent to Great Ormond Street Hospital and other placements.
90% of revenue stream is subscriptions
Print success has led to the magazine increasing its pagination by four pages this year, as well as improving its cover stock.
“We made it better for a number of reasons, but actually to kind of reinforce this point around [being] something worth talking about,” said Richard Campbell, magazine director of news at The Week Junior’s publisher Future.
He added several commercial considerations have been “advantageous” to the title this year, including “acquisitions via digital marketing” such as influencer-led creative campaigns on social media doing “exceptionally well”. This has had a “big impact” on the efficiency of bringing in “new customers to the brand”, said Campbell.
It recently saw increased conversion rates when launching ‘Something worth talking about’ back in May for our 10th anniversary (a feature on conversation starters for children to cut through the decline of the family dinner), combined with a ’10 issues for £10′ offer – “this drove better conversion rates and higher volumes of orders overall,” said Campbell.
Some 90% of The Week Junior’s revenue stream is subscription income.
“The amount of money that we’re generating from advertising and events is material and not huge as a proportion of the overall [profit and loss] for The Week Junior,” Campbell added.
Another “significant” change in the last year has been encouraging new customers to take out a bundle subscription, Campbell said, referring to The Week Junior’s digital edition. Its website does not contain content for children to read, but is more of a platform to subscribe to the brand.
“We’re seeing upwards of 30% of new customers are choosing to take a bundle,” he said, adding “from a margin perspective” the magazine can “charge a little more for each subscription on a bundle basis versus print”. Bundle readers now account for 15% of all of The Week Junior’s readers.
“And then the margin costs of serving the digital element are largely insignificant,” said Campbell. He added this has been good for “average price growth, revenue growth, and margin growth”.
While the “majority of subscribers continue to be print subscribers”, he added, the “proportion” of those subscribed to a bundle is “growing quite quickly”.
The bundle option is especially encouraged for customers as “the print supply chain becomes more challenging”, said Campbell. “Mailing is getting more expensive every year, and it’s also becoming, broadly speaking, less reliable every year.”
The bundle subscription gives readers “the protection of digital there as an alternative”, he added.
Keeping costs low through Future’s ‘buying power’
Future’s buying power also allows the magazine to negotiate lower costs with suppliers to keep costs low for customers, despite “inflation in terms of print and paper and printer costs”, said Campbell.
“So, we’ve got good volume growth on subscriptions,” as well as being able to strike “a reasonable balance” between not overpricing but “judiciously passing on those costs to customers when we need to”.
In addition, the magazine has “a significant amount of advertising revenue”, but this “doesn’t make or break our fortunes”, said Campbell.
The magazine has particularly strict limits on what it can advertise, given its young audience, but has been known to partner with banks, building societies, and video game companies to keep both the parent and child reader engaged.
“The economics of our business is based on people buying the magazine and seeing the value from that,” Campbell added.
Success for print mags The Week and The Week Junior US
The Week Junior has also seen international success, having launched in the US in 2020. It is “the fastest growing magazine in the country,” according to Campbell. “The audited circulation [was] last up by 23% of the prior year … We’re just a bit more, you know, fresh to market and newer, and there’s a big market to come after.”
Campbell also added it’s not just the child audience that makes for The Week Junior’s print success: “We’re doing really well on The Week in print, still in 2025, as well,” he said. “I guess there’s something in the value of format … there are some things that actually print just does incredibly well.”
With the average lifetime of a subscriber being three years, Campbell is aware there is more work to do on “what can we do to develop products and offers for the older end of our audience, as they kind of age out of The Week Junior”.
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