A couple of days before Richard Neville's death on Sunday, Kerin O'Connor was recalling one of the Oz obscenity trials in which Neville and publisher Felix Dennis were defendants.

But at NewsMediaWorks' Future Forum in Sydney, the focus was on the business that Dennis - who got a shorter sentence because he was deemed "more stupid" than his two co-defendants - built afterwards.

And as O'Connor explained, the success of current affairs magazine The Week in print and digital suggests that he was anything but stupid.

The magazine - which prides itself on "intelligent selection, stylish precis and wit" - launched in the UK in 1995 (with US and Australian editions following in 2001 and 2008) and has a strong profit record.

But it was the success of its subscription strategy that mid-afternoon lsiteners in Sydney wanted to hear about. Underpinned by, and building on the "process" of trust, The Week - now part of a portfolio of publications and platforms - is taken by readers "into the bed and the bath," O'Connor says.

"Your best customers are your existing customers, and 155,000 people send me £120 (A$209) every year," he says. Some of the revenue dates to the 2750 people who were given trial subscriptions in 1995, 650 of whom are still reading the magazine 20 years later, contributing £1.382 million (A$2.4 million) over time. Some 95 per cent of current subscriptions are renewals, and 72 per cent of these are the sought-after AB demographic O'Connor likes to call "affluencers".

Digital editions are a relatively new development, post-2011, and are produced by a separate team, with The Weekday "replicating the roving eye of the print edition, but with immediacy".

O'Connor, who is the publication's chief executive, "loves launching things" and has had the opportunity to "think big by starting small" with the launch of The Week Junior for younger readers. Another success for the Dennis Publishing team, it started with 2775 paid subscribers and has 20,000 nine months later.

For delegates at the Future Forum - where much of the focus was on monetising digital platforms (and some on moving to weekly publication) - O'Connor's message was to be "really brave, don't be a cliché". Richard Neville, who was the editor of satirical magazine Oz, which he co-founded Richard Walsh and Martin Sharp and died aged 74, would no doubt have approved.

Peter Coleman