The owner of the Daily Mirror and Daily Express plans to cut more than 300 jobs as the news company continues to push more video and artificial intelligence (AI) content.
Reach, which also owns the Manchester Evening News, Birmingham Mail and Liverpool Echo, told staff in an email it plans to share more content across its print papers and put a “new focus” on digital subscriptions.
Its overhaul would mean 321 redundancies and 135 new roles at the news firm.
David Higgerson, Reach’s chief content officer, said it was “the biggest reorganisation we’ve ever undertaken”.
“The changes we are seeing in the landscape right now demand a wholesale change in how we operate and how we tell stories,” he added, saying the publisher needed to “match our resources to our ambition”.
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.
The firm said it would speak directly to everyone whose job is affected by the changes.
Reach made £27m in pre-tax profit for the first six months of the year and said in July 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”.
