The publisher of the Mirror and Express newspapers is to axe 70 staff and shut weekly celebrity magazine Star, as the new owner of Richard Desmond’s national titles makes tens of millions in cost cuts.
Reach, the name adopted by Trinity Mirror after completing the £200m takeover of the Express and the Star titles and OK! magazine earlier this year, will inform staff of the cuts on Wednesday.
Staff are to be told that those affected will be subject to a 45-day consultation period, which typically means that more than 100 roles are affected. However, it is understood the number being made redundant is 70.
Reach is also shutting weekly celebrity magazine Star as part of its cost cutting drive.
Reach said since the takeover the eight national titles had begun to pool staff and editorial resources, after a successful trial with sports.
Editorial initiatives include an “internal content feed” serving all titles to provide coverage, wherever possible, of non-exclusive events of the day, and increased sharing of back-of-the-book content - for example, book and film reviews.
“Our sports desks have been collaborating very effectively in recent weeks, which gives us confidence that our plans to share other content will work well,” said a spokesman for Reach.
“The crossover readership between the titles is very low. The aim is to retain as much resource as possible in areas such as politics, exclusive story-breaking, investigations and columnists, which differentiate each of our titles and give them their distinctive character.”
The company expects to make £20m in savings by 2020 after the takeover, with £12m of that coming from cuts to editorial staff and pooling of content and resources across the titles.
Simon Fox, the chief executive of Reach, has pledged that the national newspaper titles, which are at opposite ends of the political spectrum, will remain editorially independent.
“The Mirror is not going to go rightwing and the Express is not going to go leftwing,” Fox told the Guardian in February. “They will absolutely all have editorial independence.”
The editors of the four Northern & Shell national titles have left since the deal was completed.
The job cuts do not affect staff at Reach’s regional newspaper arm, the UK’s biggest publisher of local titles, which include the Manchester Evening News, Birmingham Mail and Liverpool Echo.
In July, Reach reported a first-half loss of £100m after writing down the value of its portfolio of 160 local newspapers and websites by £150m. The move reflected the tough outlook for local titles in the digital era.
