Wednesday 8th July: Mirror and Express publisher to cut 550 jobs

July 08, 2020

Morning! Today's Media Roundup is brought to you by Peter.

Reach is to lose 12% of its workforce, 550 staff, in moves designed to save the newspaper business £35m a year. The group publishes the Mirror, Express and Daily Star, Scotland's Daily Record and regional dailies including Liverpool Echo and the Manchester Evening News

Ahead of the announcement, Reach reported a 27.5% drop in quarterly revenue and said it was facing "structural change" in the sector accelerated by the coronavirus pandemic. The Press Gazette reports management as saying it has faced "three years of impact in the space of three months".

Predictably, Reach has said the restructuring will create a "more centralised structure bringing together national and regional teams across print and digital". The financial pressures on newspapers at the moment are - to use the word that defines 2020 - unprecedented. But we worry that this is just one more nail in the coffin of much needed regional news coverage in the UK.

Travel-media business Skift is joining the ranks of publishers looking to readers to diversify their revenue mix. CEO and founder Rafat Ali launched Skift Pro, with the statement, “Skift is now officially a Subscription-First business information company.”

There may be a growing boycott of Facebook ads among some of the biggest consumer brands in the world, but Facebook is a top driver of subscription revenues. Digiday says scale, ease of use and precision targeting making it ideal for direct response ads.

Google has launched the GNI Digital Growth Programme to support small-to-medium sized news publishers across Europe. The programme includes free digital workshops, labs and online tools to help publishers grow their business online.

This week's episode:

On this 150th episode of Media Voices, Cathy Olmedillas, founder of independent children’s magazines Anorak and Dot, explains how she learned about the collectability of magazines from her time at The Face and turned that into a style of publishing that owes more to books than disposable magazines culture.

There are 150 episodes interviews in our archive. That's a lot, but you can filter through them using our handy 'Discover' page. Find interviews on editorial content, business models or innovations, whatever you're into. Go on have a browse.