The owner of the Daily Mirror and Daily Express has announced it will cut hundreds of jobs as it pivots to video and plans to share more content across its titles.
Reach, which also owns the Manchester Evening News, Birmingham Mail and Liverpool Echo, has announced 321 redundancies and 135 new roles at the news firm in “the biggest reorganisation we’ve ever undertaken”.
The National Union of Journalists (NUJ) said morale was being “dragged down” by the threat of job losses in the latest round of redundancies in recent years.
It comes as Reach continues its embrace of artificial intelligence (AI) tools, which the NUJ said raises job concerns.
The NUJ said it was “seeking further clarification on how AI will feature in the restructure”.
David Higgerson, chief content officer at Reach, said the publisher needed to “match our resources to our ambition”.
“The changes we are seeing in the landscape right now demand a wholesale change in how we operate and how we tell stories,” he said.
“For our editorial teams, we will need to adopt a different way of working from top to bottom.”
The news group said it would speak directly to everyone whose job is affected by the changes.
As part of the shake up, Reach plans to create a “live news network” which would allow a single journalist to write breaking stories for multiple titles at once.
It also plans to put a “new focus” on digital subscriptions as tabloid rivals The Sun and the Daily Mail begin to introduce paywalled online content.
Monday’s announcement comes in addition to the redundancies Reach announced in July, which put over 100 jobs at risk, and other redundancy rounds in the past few years.
The news group revealed in July it had made £27m in pre-tax profit for the first half of the year and said it wanted to “reach new audiences, increase our video content and accelerate our tech and AI capabilities”.
It added that it “our proprietary AI tools, which recommend content to keep our audiences with us for longer, drove an additional 10% of our page views”.
Chris Morely from the NUJ said: “We hear a lot from the company about the need to be ‘authoritative and authentic’ but the hole where redundant journalists were appears to be filled by the chatter from AI.”
