What Went Wrong for Reach PLC?

The media titan (formerly known as Trinity Mirror Group) has announced plans to cut 220 jobs from their editorial payroll. This coincides with the closure of their Kent Live, Aberdeen Live, and Galway Beo websites.

As the owner of titles such as the Daily Mirror, Daily Express, Daily Star, OK! Magazine, and countless regional publications such as Manchester Evening News and Liverpool Echo, you would think the business would be in sturdy enough shape, so what has gone wrong for the once mighty newsgroup?

Failure to adapt

Failure to adapt a business model in the face of the internet changing the industry is sadly far from a rare occurrence. However, it’s one of the most damning indictments you can put toward a company almost 30 years on from the fact.

As people started getting their news for free on the internet, the humble daily newspaper saw its readership quickly diminish. It’s been a problem that many of the traditional big boys in the publishing industry have yet to find an answer to.

Subscription models and aggressive advertising sales can only take these large firms so far. Unfortunately, the news model isn’t able to support the huge offices, printing presses and workforces that it used to, and conglomerates like Reach are finding that out all too well. New start-ups in the secto that do well have small teams and modest offices a world away from the sprawling resources that legacy brands like Reach have to sustain.

Not capitalising on regional titles

Of course, this issue isn’t solely confined to Reach. Many other national newspapers have felt the same pinch. Reach’s ace in the hole then, was their portfolio of regional titles. This was bolstered by 2015’s acquisition of Local World which added another 115 local titles to their roster.

While others battled to be the site read for major news stories, Reach’s network could break regional news not found anywhere else. After all, if a burst water pipe floods a roundabout in Grimsby, it’s unlikely to be featured in national outlets, but would still be of interest to the tens of thousands of people in the area.

Unfortunately, Reach neglected to report on such stories in many instances. Instead, they chose to feature national stories as filler, meaning that it wasn’t uncommon to see the same stories repeated across everything from the Glasgow Live to Devon Live websites.

Readers looking for information on that same roundabout on the Grimsby Live website would instead find stories about glass found in a cereal packet in Bristol. Reach found themselves struggling to realise what people wanted from a regional publication.

This has perhaps already been noticed as Chief Executive, Piers North, mentioned in July that the company’s “future will be less about volume and more about original content, distinctive brands and securing better returns”.

Chasing page views

For years, Reach has only looked to one metric as a measure of their online success: page views. This is because of the revenue they would receive from advertising via aggressive pop-ups and other ads.

Click-bait style headlines and social media posts designed to get readers to click the link worked well to plump up this metric but had the unwanted side effect of annoying its audience. Excessive advertising made the articles difficult to view, while the content when finally viewable, often wasn’t quite what the headline or social post suggested it would be.

Chief Content Officer at Reach, David Higgerson, has now told staff that “active engaged time will become our north star metric, over and above page views, by the end of the year”. This will surely have to involve the trimming back of their current advertising model as well as the removal of click-bait practices to make their websites more readable.

Changes at Google

As a business now heavily reliant on its online offerings, Reach is highly susceptible to changes in Google’s algorithm. That Google’s recently undertaken arguably the biggest change to its search engine since its inception, has understandably had an impact on the firm.

The rollout of Google’s AI overviews, as well as the algorithm’s consideration of user experience, has seen Reach titles lose ground on their rivals and attract fewer readers to their sites.

Phone tapping

It’s fair to say that, even though the majority of the cases occurred just over a decade ago, the phone-tapping scandal dented both the reputation and the wallet of Reach PLC. There are multiple reports of six-figure sums paid to multiple celebrities, and although a total amount is difficult to ascertain, the BBC at the time reported that some £28m was set aside by the business to deal with legal claims.

Add another £140,600 that had to be paid out to Prince Harry in 2023, and it amounts to a significant loss that would take some recovering from.

Moving ahead

The move to a time-on-page model for their websites and a focus on embracing what differentiates their titles from one another should serve Reach well. These actions, as well as the unfortunate downsizing of staff are the right moves to make.

There still remains concerns, however, that this is too little, too late, and the media juggernaut could continue on its gradual decline. Only time will tell, but for now, they’re at least making the right noises.

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