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Fighting for journalism and profitable news media
Reach to cut 160 editorial jobs | Newsquest grows profit and hits 159,000 online subs
And two top editors leave Metro as staff told ‘radical change’ needed
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Good morning from the team at Press Gazette on Wednesday, 16 September.
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📉 Reach today announced another 220 editorial redundancies just under a year after it cut 186 jobs.
Some 60 new jobs are being created, but it follows years of heavy cutbacks.
In 2022 Reach had 4,658 staff of which 3,369 were defined as production and editorial. At the end of last year that total had fallen to 3,423 of which 2,494 were production and editorial – a reduction of 1,235 jobs.
In the current era where publishers are focused on subscriptions, loyalty and deeper audience engagement, the name of the UK’s biggest commercial news publisher is beginning to feel like an anachronism.
Reach has pursued a strategy of maximising page views to its network of 200 local and national news websites to fuel programmatic advertising revenue. Critics of the publisher feel that local brands in particular have strayed from their core purpose of serving local communities with too much thinly-sourced trending content on national topics.
Now the era of big referral traffic from Google Search, Discover and Facebook appears to be over, a massive rethink is underway.
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But it managed to grow profit and has avoided making the rounds of mass redundancies we have seen at Reach in recent years.
Newsquest moved into subscriptions sooner and now boasts some 159,000 paying digital subscribers.
My sense is that it also has greater focus on direct-sold advertising by locally-managed teams who are spending more time on the road and picking up the phone. Newsquest said it also saw strong growth in events in 2025.
Newsquest also does not have national titles allowing it keep more regional and local focus editorially.
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🗞️ And the future is looking uncertain for the UK’s biggest weekday circulation nationally distributed newspaper Metro, following the sudden departure of its two top editors.
Print advertising is in decline and earlier this year Metro publisher Daily Mail and General Trust stopped publishing its ABC-audited distribution figures. At the time it stood at 952,483, down from a peak of more than 1.4 million before 2020.
Metro has never fully recovered from the pandemic and the changes that were wrought to the daily commuting patterns it relies on to reach readers who pick up free copies at stations to read on the way into work.
The Metro website has also been hit hard by the same falling referral traffic headwinds impacting Reach.