REACH TO CUT 220 EDITORIAL JOBS AT MIRROR AND EXPRESS PUBLISHER

Reach, the publisher of the Daily Mirror and Daily Express, is to cut 220 editorial jobs, it told staff this week. The company also owns the Daily Star, the Daily Record and regional titles including the Manchester Evening News, the Birmingham Mail and the Liverpool Echo. Reach will close three online-only titles, KentLive, AberdeenLive and GalwayBeo, saying they had not become the leading publisher in their areas. About 60 new editorial roles will be created, focused on subscriptions and longer-form video. Chief content officer David Higgerson set out the changes in an internal memo to staff.

Higgerson told staff the company was responding to a "mammoth shift" in how audiences find content and journalism. He pointed to a decline in traffic from Google search, driven partly by AI Overviews, which Reach said had cut such referrals by 46% year-on-year. He also cited competition from what he called an "expansionist BBC", saying it mirrored the local output of commercial publishers up to 70% of the time. The cuts follow a restructuring in September, when Reach put 600 roles at risk and cut more than 300 editorial jobs.

Higgerson said the decision to close KentLive, AberdeenLive and GalwayBeo was not a reflection of the journalism produced on those titles, but reflected their market position. He said leaders had cut non-staff budgets to try to protect jobs, but that the scale of the challenge facing the industry meant Reach needed to enter next year as a smaller editorial organisation. Reach said it would look for opportunities to redeploy affected staff to reduce the need for compulsory redundancies. It did not give a timetable for the changes.