A total of 321 jobs are to go as Manchester Evening News and Liverpool Echo publisher Reach plc undergoes its “biggest reorganisation ever.”
The company added that its latest restructure would also create 135 new roles, representing a net job loss of 186, while the National Union of Journalists (NUJ) estimates that the plans put around 600 jobs at risk.
Reach is the UK’s largest commercial news publisher, and the name behind over 130 print and online brands including nationals The Daily Mirror, Star and Express, as well as a huge portfolio of regional and local titles, both online and in print. It employed 4,305 people, 2,862 of them journalists, at the end of 2022, although that number has been steadily eroded since.
2023 was a particularly brutal year at the company, with three rounds of cuts shedding 200 jobs in January, ‘significant changes” in March seeing almost 200 more staff departing, and a smaller round of cuts in September which saw another five staff leaving.
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Addressing the latest “restructure,” David Higgerson, chief content officer at Reach, said: “Our new structure represents the biggest reorganisation we’ve ever undertaken, even more than in the early days of the digital revolution. The changes we are seeing in the landscape right now demand a wholesale change in how we operate and how we tell stories.
“For our editorial teams, we will need to adopt a different way of working from top to bottom, as we match our resources to our ambitions. It will mean that some jobs will sadly no longer exist, many will change, and around 135 new roles will be created, many in our live news network and video teams.”
Putting a positive spin on events, Reach noted that the 135 new roles will be advertised internally with priority given to people whose roles are at risk.
Reach last week shared initial details of its plans to reorganise the company’s editorial operations into eight new departments, with the goal iof achieving a “wider reach,” albeit evidently with less staff.
Speaking to Prolific North last month, Reach promised that the restructuring at the company, despite the reduced editorial team, would ring more video content, a new ‘Live News Network’ which will see regional and national journalists collaborating to bring more news to more people throughout the firm’s wide portfolio, and an overnight news team based in Australia.
The NUJ’s national Reach co-ordinator Chris Morley described the latest cuts as “devastating.”
