{"id":153552,"date":"2026-09-03T11:00:42","date_gmt":"2026-09-03T10:00:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.vuelio.com\/uk\/?p=153552"},"modified":"2026-09-02T16:52:39","modified_gmt":"2026-09-02T15:52:39","slug":"the-best-prs-understand-the-audience-as-a-whole-media-interview-with-rachel-duffy-head-of-community-at-the-times-and-the-sunday-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.vuelio.com\/uk\/blog\/the-best-prs-understand-the-audience-as-a-whole-media-interview-with-rachel-duffy-head-of-community-at-the-times-and-the-sunday-times\/","title":{"rendered":"‘The best PRs understand the audience as a whole’: Media Interview with Rachel Duffy, head of community at The Times and The Sunday Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

A good relationship<\/a> between a PR and a journalist is pivotal for getting coverage, and it\u2019s equally important that journalists engage their readers. The trend now for media outlets is to make sure they are establishing a community that people feel part of and this is something that Rachel Duffy, Head of Community at The Times<\/a> and The Sunday Times, has been working on since taking up the role six months ago.<\/strong><\/p>\n

She is well versed in the field having previously worked at The Telegraph as Deputy Head of Community, and eighteen months ago she set up the Young Journalist Network<\/a>, giving an opportunity for those starting out in their careers to make new connections and get career advice and mentorship.<\/span><\/p>\n

We chatted to Rachel about the importance of community, the different ways in which journalists are communicating with their readers, and how young journalists are engaging with PRs.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

An increasing amount of news organisations are focusing on building and retaining communities around their brands. Why do you think that is, and how important is it in the current climate?<\/b><\/p>\n

I’m sure I would say this with my title being the Head of Community, but I think it’s absolutely imperative. The question of why is twofold. Firstly, your audience. You’ve already done a lot of the hard work in attracting them and bringing them in, and getting them past the ‘shop window’ phase. It’s incredibly important to then retain them and to maintain that community, and to build deeper relationships over time, rather than having a rotating cast of readers.<\/span><\/p>\n

I think also in the face of AI, it’s so important that you have real readers and real journalists. There’s some really brilliant examples of readers across the board saying, ‘Well, this article has clearly been written by AI’, and the journalists themselves coming into the comment section and into this ecosystem of readers, and explaining the research behind it, why it\u2019s important, etc. That immediately changes the whole tone of conversation among readers.<\/span><\/p>\n

We’re trying to do more with live Q&As, where for your subscription you not only get to read your favorite columnists like Fraser Nelson, but you also get to engage with him one-on-one and have a conversation with him in the comment section. At our <\/span>community event<\/span><\/a> that we did in May after the local elections, the readers felt like they knew Fraser because he is so brilliant at replying to readers. There is this parasocial relationship with columnists, and I think in the face of AI, when you can just go onto Claude or ChatGPT and say, ‘Give me today’s headlines’, that’s such a USP and something so powerful for publishers.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

In terms of communities, which are harder or easier to engage with?<\/b><\/p>\n

In an ideal world, we want our readers to read all of the content across the site, so they’re getting the most out of their subscription. I think the two that immediately come to mind as easier to engage with are sport and puzzles, because they already have this brilliant inbuilt community of people. On a more granular level, our F1 community and our Premier League football community are incredibly engaged. Lucy Attwood, one of the brilliant Community Editors at The Times, organised a <\/span>Q&A with Molly Hudson<\/span><\/a>, who’s our F1 correspondent and is at every single race, when there had been some updates to the F1 rules and regulations ahead of the next season. Naturally, that really engaged our community of readers, who had a lot of questions and Molly was able to come in as the expert and answer them, and we were then able to turn that into a separate article.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

It’s really just about harvesting the engaged comment section and sometimes bringing that into a separate article, or keeping that conversation within the comment section, but getting the writer or an expert voice within that.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Newsletters and podcasts<\/a> have become a key way for news organisations to engage with their readers. What are the main benefits of communicating with readers in this way?<\/b><\/p>\n

It’s a direct channel to your readers, and I think it’s such a privilege to sit in their inbox next to the monthly newsletter that their brother sends because he lives in Australia, or some marketing from their favourite skincare brand. You\u2019ve got this very special place in their inbox and a direct line to them.<\/span><\/p>\n

Our daily briefing newsletter, which is a snapshot of all of the morning’s biggest headlines goes live at 6am, and that for a lot of readers is the first thing they read in the morning. I also write our Times+ newsletter, which is for our premium subscribers, and it’s brilliant to have their feedback. They’ll email me back and say, ‘Oh, I quite like this\u2019, or ‘I wasn’t such a fan of that’, and that kind of information is so important.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

How is AI impacting your work in terms of engaging with readers?\u00a0<\/b><\/p>\n

I think readers really appreciate when we write stories about the latest updates on AI. They’re getting it from a news perspective which I think is helpful to them. But we’re very transparent with readers about when AI is used and when it isn’t. It would never be used to write an article. It might be used for data collection and there’s some workflow aspects that are very helpful, too. The key though is just being open and honest about that with your readers and your community.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

As founder of the Young Journalist Network, do you think young journalists<\/a> work as closely with PRs as in previous generations? What do PRs need to know about working with journalists now?\u00a0<\/b><\/p>\n

They do still work closely with PRs, but in very different ways. The best PRs understand the audience as a whole. They understand all of the different new platforms that journalists are going to to source stories. I had a meeting this morning with the CEO of Qwoted, and he was saying that it’s about amalgamating all of those social platforms so that a journalist might say, ‘Oh well, I’ll look on Reddit, but their platform has Reddit, has X, has all of these platforms’.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

A lot of the work of YJN is helping that new generation of journalists understand how to craft those really meaningful and mutually beneficial PR relationships. Older editors can be quite dismissive of PRs as they get so many emails from them, but if you’re in a grad scheme, you may not fully understand how the industry works yet. You don’t have any concept of PRs and therefore, some of our events are focused entirely on building the relationships between the two and having journalists and PRs in the same room. Some are gatekept and it’s just journalists. We don’t want people to come to our events and feel like they’re being pitched to, but I do think it’s important to have that space.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

For more on the importance of building community and forming lasting working relationships with the UK media, download the Vuelio report ‘How news travels in today’s fragmented media environment<\/a>‘.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We chatted to Rachel Duffy, Head of Community at The Times and The Sunday Times, about the importance of community, the different ways in which journalists are communicating with their readers, and how young journalists are engaging with PRs.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":458,"featured_media":153551,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7365,7272,3725,3729],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vuelio.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/153552"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vuelio.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vuelio.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vuelio.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/458"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vuelio.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=153552"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.vuelio.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/153552\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":153558,"href":"https:\/\/www.vuelio.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/153552\/revisions\/153558"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vuelio.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/153551"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vuelio.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=153552"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vuelio.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=153552"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vuelio.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=153552"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}