The National Union of Journalists (NUJ) has urged Reach plc to urgently reconsider its pay offer to journalists following publication of the company’s annual report.
The report revealed £102.3m in operating profits, and a £1.24m pay package to Jim Mullen, Reach CEO, in 2024. The report details that Mullen’s pay package included £662,000 in bonuses – a thousand times more than the £600 bonus typically received by the company’s employees under its profit share scheme.
Reach, the largest commercial publisher of titles in the UK and Ireland – including the Mirror, Express, Irish Star, The Record and Wales Online as well as some of the UK’s biggest local titles, including the Manchester Evening News and Liverpool Echo – recorded a 6% increase in profits from the previous year.
Mullen did acknowledge staff’s “excellent and impactful journalism” in his review of the report, adding: “We have delivered a strong financial performance with an operating margin of nearly 20% and that importantly means we can meet our significant obligations, whether that’s to our former employees and pensioners or to our shareholders.”
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However, the union stressed that Reach must also meet its obligation to the current employees who have been central to the company’s success, by offering a pay award that reflects the value of their work.
Reach NUJ Group Chapel said in a statement: “Two weeks ago, all Reach employees received a gushing announcement that the company’s Profit Share Scheme had been triggered for the performance of the business in 2024 and would pay out the maximum £600 to around 3,300 employees in their March pay packets.
“Now today they learn that on the same measurements, the chief executive enjoyed an overall pay package for 2024 of £1.24 million – in large part made up of a bonus of £662,000 that could be worth more than 1,000 times their reward based on current valuations. Finance director Darren Fisher also saw his reward magnified to an overall pay package of £857,000 with a potential bonus element of £378,000.
“It is good news that the business has turned around its key digital revenues and has improved its operating profits out of which these bonuses will be paid. But this was done on the back of heroic efforts by employees to dramatically increase the number of stories going online and by those in print outperforming the market with threadbare resources thanks to significant redundancies.
“The NUJ is currently consulting its members over a pay offer from management with the headline across the board increase of just 2% – which equates to a pay cut when inflation is taken into account. This is poor reward for their part in the business turnaround.
“The one-off staff bonus that has been paid is non-consolidated and while any additional sum is of course welcome, it does nothing for meeting the financial challenges members and their families face for the future.
“The new annual report shows that the disparity in employee income has widened considerably. The CEO’s remuneration is now worth that of 35 of the lowest 25% of Reach employees – and 26 of those at the median pay of £43,000. This is very different from the respective figures in 2023 of 17:1 and 14:1.
“Our members will not have a problem with success being appropriately rewarded, but they do expect fairness and deserve better in 2025 – especially as the promising upturn in digital revenues is continuing into this year and recent big cost items such as legal costs for unlawful news gathering cases and drop in newsprint expenditure is falling away.”
2024 was a year of relative calm for the publisher after a series of redundancies the previous year. In January of last year CEO Mullen told staff there were ‘no plans for further cuts’ in 2024 after a “difficult” 2023 which saw hundreds of jobs cut in a wave of redundancies across the publisher’s titles. Salford University journalism director Dr Richard Jones described the situation at Reach as “all too common” in the current regional press.
A spokesman for Reach told Prolific North that the 2024 bonus payout had affected the latest numbers in an “unusual” year; that, across the business, salaries had increased by 5% across the board in 2024; that the group bonus, including the PSS scheme covering all employees, was at the maximum level, and that this year saw the first bonuses for executive directors in three years. They added that executive directors had received no pay increase last year.
Elsewhere, the report highlighted strong growth in Reach’s ecommerce offering, with the OK! Beauty Box singled out for particular praise, growing US audiences, with titles reaching 11% of the US population, and a strong digital end to the year which saw viewers up 6% YoY following the rollout of a new website platform at the Echo, MEN, Daily Record, Birmingham Live and Daily Star, although page views for the whole year were down 14%.
