Wednesday morning, Reach, the company that publishes the Daily Mirror, the Express and dozens of local news sites across Britain and Ireland, told its newsrooms it’s cutting about 220 editorial jobs and closing three of its local sites, in a memo the Guardian and Press Gazette both reported. The reason isn’t a mystery, and Reach didn’t pretend it was. By the company’s own half-year numbers, Google referrals to its sites fell 55% in the first half of this year and its web audience fell 40%. The clicks that paid for the newsroom stopped arriving, because Google now answers the question at the top of the page.
Let’s be real about what died here, because it isn’t journalism.
Reach, for years, ran the newsroom Google wanted. Press Gazette, which has covered the company for years, reported that it gave reporters page-view targets and pushed them to file several stories a day. It launched local “Live” sites built to be found: KentLive in 2016, AberdeenLive and GalwayBeo in 2021. Volume in, clicks out, ads on the clicks. That machine worked for a decade. Then the front door moved.
The scale of the unwinding deserves a number. By Press Gazette’s count, in 2022 Reach employed 4,658 people, 3,369 of them in editorial and production; by the end of last year it was 3,423 and 2,494. Wednesday’s round takes it lower, and Laura Davison, who runs the National Union of Journalists, called it “an act of self-sabotage.” The share price is down 90% in five years, the Guardian notes. None of that is a story about journalists being bad at journalism. It’s a story about a distribution channel that was rented, not owned.
Here is the sentence Reach’s chief content officer wrote to staff: the newsrooms will put “less emphasis on story volume and more on original journalism and distinctive brands.” The company’s north-star number, he said, will be “active engaged time” instead of page views. Volume was never the value. It was the toll Google charged for the traffic, and the toll went to zero along with the traffic.
This is not a British story. Pew Research watched 900 American adults use Google in March 2025. When an AI summary sat at the top of the results, people clicked a link 8% of the time. Without one, 15%. They clicked a source inside the summary 1% of the time. Chartbeat data reported by Press Gazette in January put Google’s search traffic to publishers down by a third worldwide in the year to November 2025, with organic search referrals in the United States down 38% year on year. Every publisher that lived on the click is on the wrong side of those numbers.
That includes the valley. USA Today Co., which was Gannett until it renamed itself last November, lists The Desert Sun among its own daily papers. Its chief executive, Mike Reed, told the Wall Street Journal in July, as Nieman Lab relayed, that it’s “time to take a stand and say enough is enough.” The company says it may turn off Google’s access completely if search traffic keeps falling. Sit with that. The company that owns this valley’s daily paper is weighing whether being found on Google is still worth what Google takes. That is Reach’s memo, one ocean over, one quarter behind. I should say what I have not done: I have not asked The Desert Sun what any of this means for the paper here, and nothing in this piece comes from anyone inside it. Its own help center still says the site is owned by Gannett.
So here is what I will not build at AICV News, and I want it on the record while Reach’s memo is still warm.
I will not build a local SEO newsroom. No “10 things to do in Palm Springs this weekend.” No rewriting the county’s press release faster than the next site. No page-view targets, ever. AI is annihilating the economics of interchangeable information. If a summary can carry the whole of what you wrote, you didn’t write much.
What survives is the part the summary can’t carry. Original reporting: somebody was in the room. Original regional data: a number that exists because we counted it. Local sources: a person who talks to us and not to a crawler. Judgment. An opinion with a name on it. Relay: most readers here don’t subscribe to the sources we read, so passing on what they reported is a service, as long as it’s labelled relay and never dressed up as our own reporting. And the same facts organized well enough that a person can read them or hear them, and an agent can cite them, once, instead of five pieces of commodity content. That kind of newsroom is also the only one with a reason to exist at the bottom of a Google result nobody clicks.
Reach’s chief content officer says the north star is now the time people actually spend with the journalism. He’s right. He’s also about 10 years late. And I’d rather be early.
So here’s my challenge, to every publisher in the IE, in the valley, and to us: name the thing you make that an AI summary can’t carry. Write it down. If you can’t, the click was your product, and you’ve just read what happens to it.