Reach, the company that owns the Daily Mirror, the Daily Express, and more than 100 local news websites, is cutting 220 more editorial jobs. Three of its local sites, KentLive, AberdeenLive, and GalwayBeo, are closing entirely. About 60 new roles will be created, but they sit in subscriptions and video, not in the newsroom jobs being cut.
This is not Reach's first round of cuts, and it will not be the last. The company cut 550 jobs in 2020, 420 in 2023, and more than 300 last September. Each round has been bigger than the one before it felt necessary, which tells you the underlying problem keeps getting worse rather than better.
The real cause is simple. Google now answers many questions directly on the search results page, using an AI-written summary. A reader searching for a news topic often gets the answer without ever clicking through to a website. Reach said its own Google traffic fell by close to half in a year, and its share price has lost most of its value over the past five years.
This is not a Reach problem or even a news industry problem. It is happening to any website that made money by showing up in Google search and hoping people would click. Shopping sites, recipe blogs, how-to guides, and business advice pages are all seeing the same pattern: fewer visitors, even when their content ranks well.
For any business that spends money on a website, a blog, or search advertising to bring in customers, this is worth watching closely. The old formula of writing helpful content so Google sends you visitors is breaking down. If your marketing plan depends on people finding you through a search engine, you need a backup plan: an email list, an app, a subscription, or some other direct line to your customers that does not depend on Google sending traffic your way.
Reach's answer is to stop chasing clicks and instead get people to pay directly, through subscriptions, or to build content valuable enough that Google's summary cannot replace it. That is a sound instinct, but it takes years to build a paying audience, and Reach is trying to do it while its main source of income keeps shrinking underneath it.
There is a wider cost here too. Fewer journalists means less reporting on local councils, courts, and businesses in the towns these papers cover. If this pattern continues across the industry, and current data suggests it will, expect fewer people watching what happens in your local area, and fewer outlets to reach when you have a story worth telling.