About The Shout

The Shout

Overview

The Shout is an online news service for Australia's liquor and hospitality industries, published by The Intermedia Group from Sydney. It describes itself as "the leading online news service for Australia's beer, wine, spirits and hospitality industries", and it operates as a business-to-business title: its readers are the people who make, distribute, sell and serve drinks, from independent bottle-shop owners and banner-group buyers to publicans, hoteliers, bar managers, licensees, suppliers and wholesalers. The site publishes news daily at theshout.com.au, organised into channels for general news, off-premise retail, on-premise venues, drinks products and features, supported by email newsletters sent several times a week.

The Shout sits inside Intermedia's drinks portfolio alongside the monthly print magazine National Liquor News, whose content is hosted in a dedicated section of the same website, and the group's beer title Beer & Brewer. It is also the publishing home for coverage of the Australian Liquor Industry Awards (ALIA), the industry's annual awards program, whose finalists and winners it announces each year. In October 2026 the site was leading with Treasury Wine Estates' annual general meeting, the winners of the 2026 Australian Cider Awards and the finalists for ALIA 2026, an indication of the breadth of trade news it handles in a single week — corporate results, product awards, retail developments, venue openings and regulatory change.

History

The Intermedia Group launched TheShout, as it was initially styled, in March 2008. The launch came with a substantial editorial investment for a trade title: its editor at the time, Ian Neubauer, later described it as "a six-figure investment in quality journalism" with a deliberate hard-news angle aimed at trade readers. The investment was recognised quickly. At the 2008 Bell Awards, held at the Four Seasons Hotel in The Rocks, Sydney, on 21 November 2008, TheShout was named Best Associated Internet Site, and Intermedia titles took the joint runner-up positions in the online category as well. Neubauer said the award recognised a commitment to business-to-business journalism at a time when major publishing companies were cutting resources.

The site settled into a tri-weekly newsletter rhythm alongside its daily web publishing. Intermedia's 2020 media kit for the title described it as the group's flagship B2B news service for the liquor and hospitality industry, by then operating for over ten years, with five full-time editors writing for the site and three newsletters a week keeping the trade up to date. The editorial team has been notably stable in the years since. Andy Young joined Intermedia as editor of The Shout in 2015, also writing features for National Liquor News, and his current author biography describes him as managing editor of both The Shout and the group's bars title, Bars and Cocktails. Deborah Jackson joined the group in the same year, 2015, as editor of National Liquor News and deputy editor of The Shout; she has since held editorial roles across the drinks portfolio, including editor of Beer & Brewer, and is now managing editor of National Liquor News.

Content and Coverage

The Shout's coverage follows the structure of the drinks trade. Its News channel carries the day's corporate and industry developments — company results and restructures, merger and acquisition activity, executive appointments, and lobbying and regulatory stories such as alcohol taxation and licensing reform. The Off-Premise channel covers the retail side of the industry: bottle-shop chains and independent retailers, banner groups, wholesalers and category trends. The On-Premise channel reports on pubs, bars, restaurants and venues, including openings, refurbishments and operator profiles. A Drinks channel handles product news — new releases, brand launches and category analysis — and a Features channel carries longer pieces, including the Wednesday Women series profiling women across the wine and hospitality industries.

Awards coverage is a significant strand. The site publishes the finalists and winners of the Australian Liquor Industry Awards across dozens of categories spanning beer, wine, spirits, RTDs and distilleries, as well as results from product competitions such as the Australian Cider Awards. Its own journalists are also recognised within the industry: Deborah Jackson received the Media Award at the 2025 Liquor Stores Association of Western Australia Awards, according to her author biography on the site, for her contribution to industry reporting. Sponsored and partner content is labelled as such on the site, sitting alongside the editorial news feed.

The site also functions as a trade forum. Stories carry comment threads, interviews with founders and executives — from family wine companies changing hands to distillers launching new brands — are a staple, and regular series such as Wednesday Women give the coverage a people focus beyond deals and results. Hospitality business conditions are a recurring subject in their own right: the site reports on the data behind the sector's trading environment, including credit, insolvency and workforce research affecting pubs, bars and restaurants, as well as campaigns on issues such as responsible service and venue safety.

Audience and Reach

The Shout's audience is the Australian drinks trade rather than the general public. Intermedia's 2020 media kit put the site's audience at 60,497 unique users per month, with around 144,450 page views and 69,880 sessions a month; those figures are the publisher's own, published in its advertising material, and are not independently audited. The same media kit broke the readership down by sector: off-premise retailers and banner groups formed the largest share, followed by on-premise operators such as pubs, clubs and bars, then suppliers and wholesalers, with public relations practitioners, analysts and consultants making up a smaller share. The kit also described a trade email database of more than 19,000 addresses receiving the newsletter three times a week, with an average open rate the publisher put at 36 per cent.

No more recent audited or publisher figures for the site's traffic were found in the sources consulted for this profile, and none are claimed here. What can be observed directly is the publishing volume: multiple new stories appear on the site each day, and its author pages record hundreds of articles by individual staff writers, including 576 articles attributed to Deborah Jackson on her National Liquor News author page at the time of writing.

Digital Presence

The Shout is a digital-only publication. Its website is the primary product, updated daily, with stories distributed through the site's newsletters and social channels. The National Liquor News section of the domain carries the monthly print magazine's content online, including its buyer's guides and market round-ups, which connects the print title's readership to the website's daily news cycle. Video content appears on the site as well, including coverage of the ALIA awards nights. The site's author archive pages function as a public masthead of sorts, carrying biographies of its senior editorial staff and counts of their published articles.

Ownership and Organisation

The Shout is owned and published by The Intermedia Group, an Australian business-to-business media company based in Glebe, Sydney. The title sits within the group's drinks portfolio, which has historically been managed as a group by a publisher overseeing titles such as Australian Hotelier, a monthly magazine for the pub and hotel market, and the bi-monthly Bars & Clubs magazine for bartenders, bar owners and nightclub managers, alongside National Liquor News and The Shout itself. Day-to-day editorial leadership rests with managing editor Andy Young, who has been with the title since 2015, while National Liquor News — whose content shares the website — is led by managing editor Deborah Jackson. Editorial contact for Jackson is published on her author page as djackson@intermedia.com.au.

Contact and Availability

The Shout is published by The Intermedia Group, 41 Bridge Road, Glebe, Sydney, New South Wales. The website is freely available at theshout.com.au and is updated daily, with newsletters distributed to trade subscribers during the week. Advertising and editorial contacts are published on the site, including on staff author pages.