Rampart in the headlines

I'm grateful for the unbelievable publicity Rampart has received over the past week, and unsurprisingly, September was our strongest month for new subscriptions so far this year. 

While James Chessell is imminently joining us from The Australian Financial Review as our new editor-in-chief, I am also delighted to confirm that Nick Bonyhady is joining Rampart as a senior writer.

Nick is the business editor of the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age and was previously the deputy editor of their Canberra Press Gallery bureau. I worked with Nick at the AFR, where he made his mark as a standout technology reporter. He is a deep thinker, perfectly suited to Rampart's unflinching style of analysis, and I am certain our subscribers are going to devour his work.

By mutual agreement, Nine and Rampart are wrapping up their partnership early, which means I have already written my final column for the AFR. It was an honour to again write for their audience over the past 18 months, and working with AFR Weekend editor Andrew Burke (who trained me on the notorious Méthode system on my first day at Fairfax 15 years ago) and in-house counsel Larina Alick was a joy. Rampart will transition to new providers of the various services Nine was providing in the coming weeks and I will now spend three days each month writing for us instead of them.

For all the hysterics in recent days, the AFR remains not just the best publishing business in Australia but arguably the world, spitting out something like $60 million of annual earnings on a margin of roughly 40 per cent – more than 4x the margin of the Financial Times and 50 per cent higher than Dow Jones (publisher of the Wall Street Journal).

As I've shared previously, 85 per cent of Rampart subscribers are AFR subscribers. Our products are complementary rather than substitutive, and that will not change because Rampart is in the slow news business, with zero ambition to build a full-service 24-hour newsroom.

Personally, I will continue to go to the AFR first for my news. I will continue to cite their articles in most of my articles, and my articles will continue, often, to be follow-on analysis of theirs. Meanwhile, one can only hope that business and finance news consumers are the winners from ongoing competition and innovation. 

Building Rampart together

It is now well beyond time for me to report back on the insights from Rampart's second subscriber survey in June. Thank you to the nearly 500 of our paying subscribers who completed it, and the hundreds more of our free readers who did as well.

Rampart thinks about the relationship with our readers, listeners and viewers differently to how most legacy media does, because we're not just delivering the news to you, we're building Rampart with you. 

The survey told us you feel the same way. Seventy-nine per cent of respondents said their subscription feels "more personal" than their relationship with traditional media. Ninety-seven per cent said they trusted our journalism. Ninety-five per cent rated Rampart better than other business publications they read. Eighty-four per cent rated our content as "very good" or "exceptional" and 86 per cent said Rampart influences how they think about their own business or money. 

These surveys are the clearest way for us to establish what Rampart's audience wants. And in response to your feedback, here's what we're going to prioritise:  

1. More deep-dive investigations: happening now

Seventy-eight per cent of survey respondents asked for more deep-dive investigations. I'm sure you've noticed, we're already doing more of them: from Amelia McGuire's recent profile of Firmus convert Wes Maas to Ben Butler's stellar unpicking of Melbourne property 'billionaire' Tim Gurner to Andy McKean's and my ongoing work on private credit and in particular Metrics Credit Partners. As our team of writers grows, so will our capacity to deliver more of this high-value journalism.

Investigative reporting like the work on Corporate Travel Management is a rarity in today's world of journalism — not just repeating headlines or management's comments, but seeking the underlying truth and providing critical analysis. It's what truly differentiates Rampart.

Drew M Flowers, managing director, financial services

2. A shorter, more regular companion podcast to Rampart Talks

Rampart Talks isn't changing – most of you like my long-form interview format with business leaders. But 35 per cent of you find it too long for a regular listen, and 21 per cent specifically asked for something shorter: 20 to 30 minutes, built for the commute.

Let's get some hot takes with a 20-minute weekly wrap of the political and business news. I'd listen to that every Saturday/Sunday.

Jack Goodman, founder, edutech

Launching in February 2027 and co-hosted by James and myself, our new weekly podcast will do exactly that: succinctly traverse the week's major stories in business, finance, economics and politics; and feature a range of guests including top business leaders and Rampart's subject matter experts. Full episodes will be available to paying subscribers, with a shorter version available for our free members.

3. Releasing a mobile app

We're also in the early stages of building a mobile app. This is a really exciting project for us. It's a product many of you have asked for, and will alleviate the log-in friction many of you experience with our website. 

Create an app, so I can turn on notifications, remain signed in and access anytime.

Anonymous, director/board member

To help us with the app development, we'd love more feedback from you. What news apps do you currently use? What features do you like? What don't you like? If you could build the perfect news app, what would it look like? Email all your suggestions to Lyndsie. She's all ears! lyndsie@rampart.news  

 Building a good app takes time. Particularly a good quality app like the one we're going to build. We're aiming to have this ready for you by Easter 2027.

4. Increasing gift articles and simplifying the process 

The ability to gift articles is a much-used feature by our paid subscribers. Because you love it so much, we've increased article gifting from three per month to four per month. Enjoy! 

But you also told us we need to make improvements to the gift article process – 17 per cent of you found it difficult to use. We're working with our product team to simplify the process, particularly for gift recipients. We've also developed these FAQs to help explain the process for gifting an article, and the process for receiving an article: https://www.rampart.news/gifting-articles-faqs/ 

5. Fixing login friction

The single most raised complaint in the survey was our login process. We understand this is a really frustrating part of your subscription. We're actively troubleshooting the login experience and it involves managing two issues: 

1. We keep our journalism behind a hard paywall, which is what makes Rampart a viable enterprise. 
2. Most subscribers use their work email addresses, and most work for companies with stringent email and firewall policies (and rightly so). Those policies account for roughly 90 per cent of the login issues we hear about: corporate cyber security can block our login emails and newsletters, or force you to sign in more often than every six months (which is the frequency setting on our end).

If you're hitting this, forward these instructions to your IT team and ask them to mark Rampart as "safe": https://www.rampart.news/login-help-faqs/ 

For most subscribers, that one step fixes it immediately. If it doesn't, or you'd rather we spoke to your IT team directly, email Lyndsie on lyndsie@rampart.news 

6. Improving group subscription flexibility 

Corporate/group subscriptions are rapidly growing and many more of you have said you'd be interested in your company taking out a group subscription. All our group subscriptions include account management functionality, but we're now in the development stages of making this functionality far more flexible to better meet the needs of our corporate subscribers. 

If you're interested in group subscriptions or to provide feedback on functionality, contact our commercial manager Anthony Simic at anthony@rampart.news 

 7. Many of you aren't aware of our private podcast feed 

44 per cent of paid subscribers didn't know their subscription includes a way to listen to the full version of Rampart Talks episodes via Spotify, Apple Podcasts and other podcast apps. For details on how to set this up, click here. 

8. Save articles to read for later 

We know many of you come across a Rampart story at a busy moment and want to give it your full attention later. So we've built a bookmarking feature for our paid subscribers. 

Next to any article, you'll now see a 'save' button, and everything you save goes into your own reading list under saved articles in your account menu.

If you save articles on more than one device, select 'refresh list' on your saved articles page to bring everything together.

Thank you, again, to all Rampart readers who gave us their time and completed the survey. Congratulations to our randomly selected paid subscriber prize winners who received a $500 gift voucher to Merivale restaurants:

• Gilbert Garrett
• Adam Trippe-Smith 

And to our free subscriber winners, who've each been upgraded to an individual annual subscription:

• Robbie Baskin 
• Carla Liedtke 
• Calvin 
• Bryce Kidd 
• Kym Jackson

I look forward to continuing to make Rampart better for all of you. If there's any further feedback, I'm always open to hearing it.

Cheers, Joe