Times Radio streams news, talk and interviews live from London, built by the team behind one of the world's longest-running daily newspapers. Stream it live and free right now on Radio Shuffle, no account or app required.
A radio station built to sell newspaper subscriptions
Times Radio has an unusually direct commercial purpose for a radio station. According to its own history, the station was announced on January 28, 2020 and launched on June 29, 2020, conceived specifically to increase digital subscription take-up for The Times and The Sunday Times newspapers rather than to generate advertising revenue in its own right. Owned by News UK, part of Rupert Murdoch's News Corp, it runs across three parts of the group at once: News Broadcasting, The Times and The Sunday Times.
Built on an infrastructure News UK already owned
That setup did not require building a broadcaster from scratch. News Broadcasting, the division behind Times Radio, began as the Wireless Group before News UK acquired it in 2016, giving the company existing radio infrastructure and expertise to redirect toward a station explicitly designed around its newspaper brand rather than built as a standalone commercial station competing purely for advertising.
A newsroom with a 235 year head start
The newspaper behind the station's name has its own long history to draw on. The Times launched in 1785 as The Daily Universal Register before taking its current name on January 1, 1788, making it one of the oldest national newspapers still publishing anywhere in the world. Times Radio inherited that institutional weight immediately, launching with a presenting lineup built around journalists like Stig Abell, John Pienaar and Matt Chorley rather than needing to build on-air credibility from zero.
Print journalism, broadcast format
Where most commercial talk stations exist purely to be heard, Times Radio exists partly to be a funnel, using its own journalism and interviews to reinforce the subscription product its parent newspapers actually sell. That dual purpose, broadcasting as marketing as much as broadcasting as a business in its own right, makes it a genuinely unusual entry in British commercial radio.
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