Reach, the company behind the Daily Mirror, the Express and dozens of local news sites across Britain and Ireland, told its staff Wednesday it’s cutting about 220 editorial jobs, the Guardian reports. Three online-only local brands close with them: KentLive, AberdeenLive and GalwayBeo. About 60 new editorial roles get created, aimed at subscriptions and longer video, and last September’s round already took more than 300 editorial jobs, by the Guardian’s count.
The reason Reach gives is Google. Earlier this year, the Guardian says, the company blamed a slump in page views on a 46% year-on-year drop in traffic from Google, because AI Overviews and AI Mode answer the question before anyone clicks through. By July it was worse. Reach’s own half-year report put Google referrals down 55% for the first half of 2026 and its website audience down 40%. Digital revenue for the half fell 11% to £54.2m.
Here’s the sentence we’d underline. David Higgerson, Reach’s chief content officer, wrote to staff that the newsrooms will put “less emphasis on story volume” and more on original journalism and on brands that stand apart, and that the company’s north-star number will be “active engaged time” instead of page views, by the end of the year. Press Gazette, which has covered Reach for years, calls that a major change for a publisher that long prioritized page views, and reported in July that Reach had given reporters page-view targets and urged them to file several stories a day. The three sites closing were built in that era, KentLive in 2016 and the other two in 2021, Press Gazette says. Higgerson says they’re closing because Reach isn’t the dominant publisher in those markets, not because of the work.
The Guardian puts Reach at 50,000 paying digital subscribers across six major titles, with a target of 75,000 by the end of its financial year, and its share price down 90% in five years. Laura Davison, general secretary of the National Union of Journalists, called the cuts self-sabotage, RTÉ reported. Higgerson also blamed the BBC, which he says mirrors local publishers’ output up to 70% of the time.
The same thing has been measured in the United States. Pew Research watched 900 American adults use Google in March 2025: with an AI summary at the top of the results, people clicked a link 8% of the time; without one, 15%. And one American publisher has said in public what it would do about the same decline. USA Today Co. chief executive Mike Reed told the Wall Street Journal in July it was time to take a stand, and the company said it may turn off Google’s access completely if search traffic continues to decline, as Nieman Lab relayed.
What we couldn’t pin down: where Reach first stated the 46%, and which desks carry the 220. We haven’t asked Reach, and we haven’t asked The Desert Sun what its owner’s stance means for the paper here.