The owner of the Daily Record, Mirror and Express is cutting hundreds more jobs as it embraces artificial intelligence and content-sharing across its titles.
Reach, which also owns big city titles such as the Birmingham Mail, Liverpool Echo and Manchester Evening News, is seeking 321 redundancies and 135 new roles at the news firm in “the biggest reorganisation we’ve ever undertaken”.
The National Union of Journalists (NUJ) demanded “further clarification on how AI will feature in the restructure”, as it said morale was being “dragged down” by the constant threat of job losses.
In July Reach said it was looking to cut a further 50 jobs, mainly in its sports and arts departments in England and Wales.
David Higgerson, chief content officer at Reach, said the publisher needed to “match our resources to our ambition”.
He added: “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.
Reach plans to create a “live news network” which would allow a single journalist to write breaking stories for multiple titles at once. This has been commonplace at other publishers for many years.
It will also be stepping up digital subscriptions as tabloid rivals The Sun and the Daily Mail introduce paywalled online content.
The company 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”.
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