Podcast powerhouse Goalhanger has always been one step ahead. It launched its first audio podcast, Behind Closed Doors, back in 2018. It began transitioning its audio catalogue – currently 13 podcast brands, including The Rest is Politics – into video podcasts in 2024. Now, it is rolling out a written content strategy.
Founded in 2014 by Gary Lineker, former ITV sports production head Tony Pastor and ex senior BBC journalist and producer Jack Davenport, the Goalhanger team – now 80-strong and London-based – creates story-first podcasts across history, politics, sport, business, entertainment, culture and drama.
The media and production company prides itself on building shows built around trusted voices fronted by leading names in culture and media and serving thoughtful content for “the curious” – serving audiences comfortable with complexity.
The Rest is History, for example – Apple Podcasts Show of the Year (2025) – has 30m monthly full episode streams and is now the world’s most listened to history podcast. The Rest is Politics, meanwhile, has 13.5m monthly full episode streams plus a further 9m for The Rest is Politics US.
In 2025, Goalhanger’s podcast portfolio surpassed 750m full-episode streams in a single year. Meanwhile, the company struck a partnership with Netflix to bring The Rest is Football to the platform for the 2026 World Cup. And it was ranked by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism as the UK’s leading news podcast producer.
In January 2026, Goalhanger secured its first external investment (from Los Angeles-based investment firm The Chernin Group, which bought a minority stake) to support its next phase of growth – involving scaling hit show franchises into global, multi-platform IP and accelerating expansion in the US.
In July, Goalhanger was named the fastest-growing businesses in Britain in the Sunday Times’ latest list of the 100 quickest-growing private companies with sales of £37.9m boosted by the rise in subscriptions and live events.
All of which begs the obvious question: with podcasts driving so much success, what’s with the written word? The answer lies in Goalhanger’s self-declared focus on building out across formats not just platforms, prioritising human-created content and upscaling its growth without losing its soul.
Making show notes available to enthusiastic podcast listeners after an episode has dropped is not new, admits Editorial Director Emily Kent Smith, who joined the company in January this year from the Sunday Times where she was associate editor. But what she is now doing at Goalhanger is somewhat different.
Newsletter strategy
“The podcast industry is moving towards newsletters. Typically, this is because when a podcast sits on another platform the podcast producer does not own, that producer does not own the audience. A newsletter into the audience’s in-box gives direct access by removing the middleman,” she explains.
So-called “inbox editorial content” isn’t just valued by the podcast maker, however. She continues: “For the right subject for the right audience, deeper dive written content to take you further into a relevant story or theme can provide a podcast’s audiences with real additional value.”
Goalhanger podcasts are available either free with ads or paid-for ad-free – the latter being a subscription model it calls “club membership”. More than 250,000 club members now pay for one of its podcasts. And while any listener can sign up for a newsletter, non-members can read only a proportion of it while members get access to it all.
It’s about super-serving an audience already engaged by a niche interest to encourage more paid-fors, sign-ups and more sign-ups to convert to paid-fors. It’s also about building a sense of community to make the audience experience of listening to and watching a podcast and its associated content – also including, increasingly, events – more compelling.
Rather than simply rolling out a standard newsletter equivalent of a spin-off magazine for each brand in the Goalhanger portfolio, Kent Smith’s approach has been more considered – and nuanced.
First, she set some overarching principles for the Goalhanger written content strategy. Then, she assessed if and how to apply this to each podcast brand according to its own particular nature, wants and needs.
“The overarching principle is first and foremost that written content deepens the membership offering by encouraging people to spend more time in a particular podcast’s universe during each week by offering them deeper content,” she explains.
Secondly, it is to increase the size of the known audience, by encouraging people they don’t yet know, who live on the third-party platforms, to sign up, by offering them extra content.
Thirdly, it should deepen connection by building out each podcast brand’s universe with richer and more in-depth content.
“Unlike other media companies, Goalhanger has fifteen verticals and each of its shows cover different and distinct subjects. As a result, each show is run a bit like a mini empire with its own producer and production teams,” she continues.
Horses for courses
“From a written content perspective, what might work for The Rest is Politics won’t necessarily work for The Book Club. And in some cases, written content doesn’t really work well at all. What we are not doing is trying to find one blanket approach for everything.”
When Kent Smith arrived, those newsletters that did exist used the MailChimp platform. Since then, she has been trying different platforms for different brands according to the nature of the content and the community each is serving and testing different ways to use written content to drive membership.
For The Rest is Politics, for example, two weekly newsletters complement the main podcast offering – the lead podcast on a Tuesday, the question time podcast on a Thursday, the Leading interview-based podcast on a Monday and ad hoc emergency live streams.
One newsletter is curated by hosts Alastair Campell and Rory Campbell, with the former writing an article for it once a month and the later once every few. The other, out on a Sunday, is a deep dive 1,500-word opinion essay on the theme deemed to be of most interest to the main podcast’s listeners that week.
In contrast, for The Rest is History, the newsletter which supports that podcast each week now features rich content from guest historians with deep dives into selected aspects of that week’s topic – including some not covered in the show.
For relative newcomer The Book Club, which debuted in February, the weekly newsletter Book Club Notes launched in May is a longer format. Content includes more about the book featured on the podcast that week plus reading notes for listeners wanting to host their own discussion and audience reviews, polls and votes on how highly they rate each choice.
The newsletter for spy-themed podcast The Rest is Classified, meanwhile, is written by the podcast’s producer as a diary of how they put together the podcast episode for that week.
Since January, newsletters for the two biggest Goalhanger podcasts - The Rest is Politics and The Rest is History - have been re-launched. Growth on The Rest is Politics has been more than 500% over that period.
Until recently, ‘newsletters’ was a two-person team; Kent Smith and Isabelle Stanley would do all the commissioning and writing, as well as outsourcing to freelance writers and selected members of Goalhanger’s podcast production teams and external experts.
Recognition for the team’s efforts came in July when The Rest is Politics Newsletter won ‘Best Deep Dive Newsletter’ at the Publisher Newsletter Awards.
Editorial approach
“The editorial approach isn’t led by what’s the biggest story that week but by what that particular podcast’s audience might find most interesting from that week’s podcast to deepen their perspective,” she explains.
Also important is to ensure content remains sharply focused. “What makes Goalhanger special is serving niche interests deeply,” she continues. “Stretch the content too far and you risk diluting what is these podcasts’ core strength.”
Kent Smith has also been overseeing putting written content on respective show websites for audiences to access when they choose. “It’s not about websites with daily updates,” she says, “but serving members with an archive of content they can refer to whenever they choose.”
Though she describes the written content strategy as “still very much in start-up mode”, it has clear measures for success.
“The main one is: does it satisfy the members by making them feel it is worthwhile as part of what they pay for? Then, does it drive new unknown audiences? Then, is it good journalism?” she says.
“With the different platforms we are using, we are experimenting with different styles of audience feedback. Luckily, with such engaged audiences, we get lots of it. It’s much more of a two-way conversation than in traditional publishing.”
To date, Kent Smith says her biggest challenge has been adapting from working in a word-first organisation – where video and audio and social were extensions – to working at an audio / video first company where the journey you are building is the reverse. But in this also lie opportunities.
“An important difference between us and established media is we can test and try. And our audiences don’t have entrenched expectations – they are flexible, so we can be, too. You build something new from scratch. You have a chance to test and learn,” she observes.
And the biggest lessons she’s learned?
“To be flexible in how you approach copy,” she responds. “In traditional journalism, there are prescriptive rules you often follow simply because that’s the way things have always been done. Coming here – to what is in effect a teenage company, with a constant flow of new shows – you need to be open to new opportunities.
This makes you question, why do things the traditional way, she explains: “It means asking yourself, is this audience- or brand-led or simply the way you always have done something by default. Here, we don’t have to cover news the traditional way and we don’t have to be led by the world’s news agenda. It’s about what our audience wants.”
And in this lies an important lesson – for other podcasters and more traditional content publishers, alike.
“Do what’s right for the audience. What we do here is working for our audiences but won’t necessarily for other companies’ audiences. And not all shows lend themselves to a written content strategy,” Kent Smith says. “And, for traditional media organisations, especially: push yourself to think outside the box.”
This article was first published in InPublishing magazine. If you would like to be added to the free mailing list to receive the magazine, please register here.
