09 March 2026

The heart of the matter: How Hello! is forging deep connections with readers in the AI age

It was a royal wedding that caused such a stir, Netflix made a documentary about it. When Princess Märtha Louise of Norway married American shaman Durek Verrett in 2024 (captured in series Royal Rebels: An Unlikely Love Story), it saw a swarm of paparazzi descending on Geiranger where the three-day nuptials took place. Finding themselves in the eye of the media storm, as is so often the case, was Hello! magazine.

“There were moments of that weekend that will live with me forever – moments that felt like we were literally in a James Bond film,” Sophie Vokes-Dudgeon, Chief Content Officer at Hello! UK recalled, speaking at the recent FIPP World Media Congress.

“We were tearing down the Norwegian fjords in a yacht with the royals, boats of paparazzi behind us and drones overhead. It was really something crazy. We told this behind-the-scenes story in a video that we shared with our most loyal followers. What we’ve discovered is that these stories with insights and access that you don’t get even in the magazine are some of the most popular stories that we tell at the moment.

“It’s a rocky road for media right now, and in these times, we need to be telling more of the sorts of stories that our loyal readers like.”

Finding different ways to tell stories since its launch in the UK in 1988 has allowed Hello! (and ¡Hola! – the 82-year-old Spanish publication that gave birth to it) to keep a strong connection with its readers. It’s a bond that remains unshakable in the face of the latest big disruption: artificial intelligence.

“Community, communication and connection are three Cs that are very important to us now at Hello! and ¡Hola! – and something AI can’t do,” said Vokes-Dudgeon. “We tell real stories, stories with heart and told from a human perspective – the types of stories AI can’t tell for obvious reasons.

“Humans have been telling stories since the beginning of time. They’re the foundation of society and we will be telling stories forever more, which should be good for business.

But the problem is big tech has cottoned on – they’ve been coming after our stories for too long. First of all, it was social media then search engines, now artificial intelligence.

“But the thing that heritage brands like Hello! and ¡Hola! must remember is that we do have a headstart. We have been perfecting the art of human storytelling for the last eight decades, and we’ve built trust – the trust of our readers and the trust of the people that we write about.”

The naked truth

¡Hola! has been building bridges with its readers, and the famous faces it covers, since 1944 when it was founded by newlywed couple Antonio Sanchez and Mercedes Junco in Barcelona. The pair’s aim was to bring to the surface what they called the “spuma de la vida” (the froth of life) – coverage of royalty, Spanish High Society and celebrities that would be the journalistic equivalent of the bubbles on the top of a glass of Champagne.

Over the years, everyone from Clark Gable to Taylor Swift have adorned the cover of ¡Hola!  and Hello! as the brand established a presence in 19 countries, with 16 print editions and 12 websites, in eight languages, and distribution in more than 120 countries.

No publication has become more synonymous with the celebrity scoop, whether it’s the first images of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie’s newborn daughter, Shiloh, photos and interviews with Melania Trump or the wedding of Antonio Banderas’s daughter Stella last year.

As the exclusive coverage of the wedding of Princess Märtha Louise showed, ¡Hola! and Hello! have particularly strong links with royalty across the globe – a relationship that has become the stuff of legend.

“I love the stories about the beginnings of ¡Hola! magazine,” grinned Vokes-Dudgeon. “There’s the story about Princess Diana who had been caught by the paparazzi sunbathing, but she wasn’t wearing a top. The pictures were being offered around to the highest bidder.

“Eduardo Sr was in charge of the magazine, Antonio and Mercedes’s son, and he did not hesitate to purchase the pictures, but not to put in the magazine, instead to hide away, make sure that they never saw the light of day and save the princess’s blushes.

“It really is a story that epitomises to me the magazine’s prioritisation of kindness and relationships with the people that we write about. It’s a strategy that pays off. Hello! magazine threw a charity polo match to celebrate 40 years and who presented the prizes? None other than Princess Diana.”

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The royal connection

Hello! acts as a link between the public and royals through the Royal Club, one of the brand’s hugely successful membership initiatives that allows for a close, two-way connection with its most ardent royal fans.

“The thing that I like best about communities is that you can communicate with the people that you’re writing content for,” added Vokes-Dudgeon. “Our 100,000 members of the Royal Club have told us that they don’t want to read stories about Kate Middleton, which sounds peculiar until they explain. They do want to read stories about Catherine, Princess of Wales.

“In a world where we’re writing stories for algorithms, we have no choice in the matter. Google search volume dictates that Kate Middleton will always win, but when we are writing for communities, we can listen to them. We can also produce lots of different sorts of content.”

Members of the Royal Club are taken right into the heart of royal life. Hello!’s royal editor, Emily Nash, is on the royal rota and travel with the British Royal Family. She cleverly uses voice notes to reach out to readers while on the road.

Hello! also has roving reporters on the ground constantly keeping the community up to date about elements of a story before it’s even hit the magazine’s homepage. And then there are podcasts for even more royal discussions.

“In my mind, podcasts is the most intimate form of human storytelling,” said Vokes-Dudgeon. “It doesn’t matter whether our audience is walking their dog or making dinner for their family with headphones on, our editors are in their brains being spoken to directly.

“It doesn’t get much more one-to-one than that, and then we follow up with social media, making our writers for the first time front and centre of the posts. We hold events and invite our audience to travel sometimes quite long distances to come and meet the writers that they’ve started to develop a relationship with and to continue the conversations that they’ve enjoyed.”

For the brand, its royal coverage is very much a two-way street. “Our community wants to communicate. They want to communicate with us and with each other,” added Vokes-Dudgeon. “They do that writing in comments and also polls. We then use those polls to influence the stories that we write.

“Our community have even now started to write content for us. We’ve not even requested it. They just sort of can’t help themselves.”

Bowing to print

First and foremost, Hello! and ¡Hola! built its reputations as a glossy magazine you take off the shelf and spend hours paging through. It’s a legacy the brand holds dear.

“For me, a magazine is about me time,” added Vokes-Dudgeon. “It’s me giving myself the luxury of time. Luxury is at the heart of our print strategy. Certainly, for luxury advertisers, print is very important, but I mean more the feeling that you get.

“If someone has invested time and money to our brand, then the experience that they have has to feel luxurious. At Hello! we’ve given ourselves a subtle but glamorous makeover just to make sure that feeling is spot on.

“We’ve invested in our paper stock, and we’ve even launched four standalone luxury issues, which allow us to delve a little bit deeper into what luxury means to us through the lens of a weekly Hello! magazine.”

Print is going extremely well for the brand – Hello! remaining at the top of the market in its area while also discovering a whole other source of readership through special editions.

“I would say we are bucking the trend from what I hear among some other media companies. I say that the feeling that print gives you is critical, but I actually think that’s true of all of the content that we produce. In this brave new AI world that we all find ourselves in It seems to make sense for us to focus on the things that AI can’t do.

“We know that our readers want to feel, they want their emotions to be touched. They want to read human stories about humans that make them feel that the experiences and feelings they have, they’re not alone in. They want the story, but they also want the story behind the story and they want a community to communicate, to feel connected.

“They consider our writers experts, so they want to hear their opinions, their insights, and most of all in this world of disinformation, they need to trust us. Some of this we’ve been doing for decades and some of it is really new, but in this crazy AI world that we find ourselves in, this is what storytelling looks like for Hello and ¡Hola! magazine.”