Awards

Talk To The Press was founded in the 2010s (before being aquired by SWNS) and won a number of awards for start-up businesses and entrepreneurship in its early days.

These included a ‘Women in Business’ award for founder Natasha Courtenay-Smith, a 2010 Smarta award for being Britain’s smartest small business, and ‘Outstanding New Publicity Solution’ at the Global Business Excellence awards.

Over the years, staff from Talk To The Press and parent company SWNS have won many NAPA awards, which are issued by the National Association of Press Agencies. These include Feature Story of the Year, Young Reporter of the Year, Picture of the Year and Spec News Story of the Year. In fact, at one event we won four of the six awards up for grabs! (you can read about that here)

More recently, the SWNS Digital Team was shortlisted for Editorial Team of the Year: B2B at the Association of Online Publishers (AOP) Digital Publishing Awards in 2023. 

And in 2025 SWNS won Best Commercial Partner at the Press Awards – the Oscars of the British press industry.

Here’s what the judges had to say about us:

“SWNS provides more content to commercial UK national newspapers and websites than any other independent news agency. The digital transformation project that it embarked on two years ago is reaping rewards: last year – its 50th year – it achieved a near 40 per cent increase in landing digital content with its clients by aligning its products and services with their strategies. In addition to its 13,000 wire stories, it provided a record 300-or-so bespoke ‘top drawer’ exclusives in 2024 – including the video of the Princess of Wales appearing at the farm-shop, which silenced conspiracy theorists after her surgery and drove massive traffic to the Sun Online and its new Royal podcast, and the video of Labour MP Mike Amesbury punching a constituent for Mail Online.”

“Its digital-first strategy has not compromised print usage. It provided page-ready content at scale to Metro, allowing editorial staff to focus on digital growth. And in new training partnerships with The Times and The Telegraph, SWNS provides bespoke newsroom training for young journalists. “SWNS continues to be a force to be reckoned with,” said the judges. “It has not just embraced the digital era, but leveraged it to achieve even greater strategically-focused success.”

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