Reach, the British publisher of the Mirror and the Express, is cutting 220 editorial jobs and shutting three online-only brands after traffic from Google to its sites fell 46% year on year. It is creating around 60 new editorial roles at the same time, tied to subscriptions and long-form video, for a net reduction of 160 posts out of an editorial and production staff of 2,494. The company attributed the cuts to a "huge shift" in how audiences find and consume content.
The three closures, announced on Wednesday, are KentLive, AberdeenLive and GalwayBeo. Reach's stated reason for killing them is that they failed to become leading publishers in their regions. That is a verdict on a local expansion strategy, not on artificial intelligence, and it has been filed inside an announcement about AI search.
The 46% figure is the number doing the work here. Reach said earlier this year that its overall decline in digital page views was driven primarily by that fall in Google referrals. Google's AI Mode and AI Overviews answer questions inside the results page, so fewer people click through to the sites that supplied the answer. Reach owns dozens of regional titles built for exactly that click — Manchester Evening News, Birmingham Mail, Liverpool Echo — along with the Daily Star and the Daily Record.
David Higgerson, Reach's content director, told staff the company sits at the centre of a large-scale change in how audiences choose content and journalism. A sustainable future, he wrote, requires the company to put investment where audiences spend the most time and where revenue reflects the value of the work. For newsrooms, he said, that means less attention to how much gets published and more to original journalism and what makes each brand distinct.
Alongside the volume argument, Higgerson blamed an "expansionist BBC" for reproducing up to 70% of the local agenda set by commercial publishers.
The 60 new roles are aimed specifically at subscriptions and long-form video, which Reach has named as the two pillars of its future. The company currently runs subscription offers across six of its larger titles, has 50,000 paying digital subscribers, and expects to reach 75,000 by the end of this financial year. Its shares have lost 90% of their value over five years. In the year ending 3 March, digital revenue fell by almost 1%, to £128.9m.
That last pair of numbers is the most interesting thing in the announcement, and nobody is drawing attention to it. Google traffic collapsed by 46%. Digital revenue moved by less than one percent. Those two facts can only coexist in two ways: either the traffic Reach lost was worth almost nothing per reader, or the revenue damage has not arrived yet.
Both readings undermine the plan. If search readers were close to worthless, then cutting 220 journalists is a response to a loss of volume rather than a loss of money, and the emergency is partly self-declared. If the damage is still in transit, then 60 roles and a subscriber target of 75,000 are not a defence against it. Reach has not said what those 25,000 additional subscribers are worth against £128.9m of digital revenue, and that omission is the centre of the announcement, not a detail in it.
The metric change lands in the same light. Reach is dropping page views as its primary measure of engagement in favour of "active engaged time." Higgerson said editors will adapt to the character of their own titles, with the goal of reaching as many people as possible with journalism they associate with a specific brand, and converting more of them into paying subscribers. Changing the primary metric may well be correct; changing it in the same week that page views became the embarrassing number makes the timing hard to read as anything but convenient.
The BBC claim deserves the same scrutiny nobody is applying. The announcement gives no basis for the 70% figure — no method, no period, no sample. A memo that assigns the cause of a 46% traffic decline to Google and a competitive squeeze to the BBC is a memo about everything except the product, which is the one variable Reach controls.
Reach employed an average of 3,423 people at the end of its last financial year, with a payroll of £208.5m. Removing 220 editorial jobs takes a few percent off that cost base in response to a structural change in how readers reach journalism at all. The arithmetic of this round works. The arithmetic of the next one, if Google referrals fall another 46%, does not.