The publisher of the Mirror, Express and Star newspapers has put 600 jobs at risk in its latest restructure to adapt to changing reader habits and the impact of artificial intelligence.
Reach, which also owns scores of regional titles including the Manchester Evening News, the Birmingham Mail and the Liverpool Echo, said on Monday that it intends to make 321 editorial redundancies.
The overall number of jobs at risk is separate to a restructure of its commercial and production operations, as well as roles affected by the creation of a central sports hub for coverage across its national and regional brands, which was announced in July.
The company, which reported profits of almost £100m last year and whose chief executive, Jim Mullen, departed in March, said the restructure was part of a shift to producing more video and audio content, as well as a live news network.
“Our new structure represents the biggest reorganisation we’ve ever undertaken, even more than in the early days of the digital revolution,” said the Reach chief content officer, David Higgerson. “The changes we are seeing in the landscape right now demand a wholesale change in how we operate and how we tell stories. For our editorial teams, we will need to adopt a different way of working from top to bottom, as we match our resources to our ambitions.”
Higgerson said the company will also be creating 135 new roles as part of the restructure, and aims to “give priority to people whose roles are at risk”.
As part of the restructure, the company also said it was “putting a new focus on digital subscriptions”.
Reporting its half-year results in July, the new chief executive, Piers North, said that while Reach would remain “primarily ad-funded for the foreseeable future” it planned to put a “serious focus” on building a subscription business.
North, who reported a 3.4% drop in half-year total revenues, said subscriptions was “one market trend we haven’t yet taken advantage of”.
In February, the Sun launched a £2-a-month paywall around content by star writers including Jeremy Clarkson, as well as some exclusive stories and investigations.
The Sun first launched a paywall in 2013 but scrapped it two years later.
At the start of last year MailOnline launched a part paywall at £4.99 a month via Mail+, offering core content, and has since attracted more than 100,000 subscribers.
Publishers are seeking to diversify revenue streams and build up direct traffic in order to reduce historical reliance on users clicking through from platforms such as Google.
The rapid advances in artificial intelligence have added impetus, with publishers saying that products such as Google’s AI Overviews and AI Mode are cutting click-throughs by as much as 90% to some content, as web users find answers to searches without the need to visit source websites.
In 2023, Reach’s Manchester Evening News became the publisher’s first title to launch a paid-for offering, with a metered paywall on its app and the Manchester United football news app.
The National Union of Journalists expressed concern at the impact of the latest round of job cuts on staff morale.
“Yet again, morale is being dragged down by the threat of mass redundancies,” said Chris Morley, the NUJ’s national coordinator for Reach. “The thought that any media business can afford to shed hundreds of talented journalists to secure its future makes you wonder what sort of future that will be.”
The company has undergone relentless and deep rounds of redundancies and cost-cutting in recent years.
In July, Reach put 104 jobs at risk as part of a move to “streamline” its sports journalism, production and distribution into a central hub. About 50 roles were expected to ultimately be made redundant.
In a 12-month period to the end of 2023 the company pushed through three rounds of redundancies – cutting close to 800 roles in total – the biggest annual loss of jobs in the UK newspaper industry for decades.
At the end of last year, Reach employed just over 3,500 staff, according to the company’s latest annual report. The company employs nearly 2,600 across editorial and production.
At its peak in 2018, Reach employed almost 5,500 staff after an acquisition spree included buying Richard Desmond’s Northern & Shell, home to the Express and the Star titles and OK! magazine, and the UK’s largest regional newspaper group, Local World.
