A “methodical” approach to building audiences for the Mirror, Express and Irish Star in the US has “proven they can wash their own face” even amid a period of “rapid” staff expansion.
Reach, the UK’s biggest commercial news publisher, announced in early 2023 it planned to launch US operations for the Mirror, the Express and the Irish Star (then a print-only title). It had already launched Liverpool.com, a dedicated Liverpool FC site aimed at UK and US audiences, in 2019.
In the past two years it has built an operation of about 70 people dedicated to the dotcom titles, with 50 in New York, ten in the UK working exclusively for the US brands and ten in California.
The US project is profitable, having reached in-month profitability at the end of last year and increased it since then, Reach’s US managing director Michael Cascio told Press Gazette.
Cascio said the combined brands are ahead of their audience targets for this year and that they now reach around 10% of the US population each month having grown the audience by a third in the past year, per Comscore.
According to digital intelligence platform Similarweb, the Mirror US had 13.1 million desktop and mobile visits in June, the Irish Star had 7.4 million and the Express US had 3.1 million.
This compares to around 31 million visits for The Sun US, which launched several years earlier in 2019 but which carried out a major round of redundancies in September last year in response to traffic referral declines from platforms like Google and Facebook.
Cascio described Reach’s arrival in the US as “methodical”: “We entered the market at a different time than some other UK brands that entered the US market. We did not have wind at our back from the likes of Facebook, for example.”
Cascio, who joined Reach at the start of 2024, added: “Because we’re so focused on making this a profitable endeavour, once we went through our period of rapid expansion last year, it was really about enabling the team to settle and start to increase our average page views per article and build from there.
“I think we’ll remain a very positive story in the US, or at least the New York and California media market, in the sense that we will continue to hire through next year, though I think our growth will slow a bit, just because we had so many people that we needed to bring in, that would not be sustainable… I think we do have a really good handle on not just where we are today, but where we’re going to look to find audience for the remainder of the year in order to achieve our growth target.”
Similarly editor-in-chief Alex Wellman told Press Gazette: “There’s no point coming out here and racing for the finish line when you’re in a marathon,” citing the 2024 closure after eight months of US digital news start-up The Messenger.
“That’s a warning to everyone. We know it’s a tough industry and a tough thing at the moment, what we’ve got is experience and history in how to work things in a slow way.
“Every step of the way, I need to be able to wash our face, because we’re responsible to the business and responsible to 70 people here, and responsible to the shareholders. And I want this to last: if the Mirror’s 100 years old at home, I’d like this to be 100 years.”
Cascio, who previously co-founded tech start-up Remixd which let publishers turn articles into audio with targeted ads and which was bought by Global in 2021, described the Reach US operation as “behaving a bit like a start-up.
“Unlike a startup, I’m not looking for our next round of funding, but we are very nimble. We’re very agile.”
Cascio said the key to Reach building its audience in the US from scratch had been ensuring it was not too reliant on any one source.
In particular, syndication/aggregator platforms like Newsbreak, Smartnews and MSN are helping in three ways according to Cascio: “One is helping us get more exposure for the brand. The brands are still relatively new to the US market. Two, there’s the revenue implication and what they can do for us financially. And three is the traffic that we can acquire back from the content that we’re distributing.
“So we have a very thoughtful linking strategy so that people who want to find out more about topics that they’re reading on a Smart News or Newsbreak can click back to the point of origination your Irish star or Express, so that we not only get revenue and audience off platform, but we actually can attract about 5% of that audience back to our dotcoms.”
Reddit has also worked well: the Mirror US, Express US and Irish Star each have a karma score (an indicator of content quality from upvotes and downvotes by users) of more than one million. For comparison, Metro UK, which also posts regularly on Reddit, has a post karma of 249,873. The Mirror US profile on Reddit is marked as a “Top 1% Poster”.
Cascio noted: “Toward the end of May, we had a little bit of volatility with Google Discover, which is a very good source of traffic for us. So we’ve pivoted into Reddit and other channels where we get very good returns… Something like Reddit requires a great deal of art and science and human touch. There’s not really any way to game Reddit. You have to be very authentic. You have to understand the subreddits that you’re participating in, and the nuances of those communities and behave in an authentic manner.”
He added: “Our ability to shift from one distribution source to the next is one of the ways that we de-risk ourselves a little bit from any one source of traffic going away. That being said, of course, Facebook and Google are still massively important to us.”
Reach US operation becomes ‘site agnostic’
Initially the Mirror, Express and Irish Star each had their own editor and the brands were run separately. But last year when two of the editors left, Wellman became editor-in-chief of all three and set up a “one team” approach. Wellman had previously been group deputy head of showbiz at Reach and had moved to New York for the job.
Staff now work across the Mirror, Express and Irish Star in the US, publishing stories on the site where it has been identified that they will perform the best.
Several months into the launch, the team looked at what the sites were ranking for on Google and highlighted four topics on each that were getting the strongest visibility. For example, golf is strong on the Irish Star.
They decided whether those topics sat naturally within each brand and said: “If it does, let’s make it a segmentation plan, a non negotiable, which comes down to something as simple as let’s make sure we’re doing one or two stories a day, every day, on that, ideally with the same author,” Wellman explained.
“Now that doesn’t mean we generate a story if there isn’t one there, if there’s not one there, let’s not do it. But we should always be able to find a story on TSA [Transportation Security Administration], for example. We should always be able to find a story on the Kardashians, for example. So we targeted three or four key topics to build authority and visibility. It’s not an exact science, but we found that that has worked for us.”
The newsroom has heads of section leading news, showbiz and sport and Wellman explained “it’s up to them to divvy up their teams and what goes where”.
“We found that that fluid working has benefited us in terms of leaning into traffic opportunities and event opportunities and referral opportunities as well. It just seems a much more efficient way of working while we’re a small team and we’re growing ever more.
“I don’t think I’d ever say we won’t go back to site specific things – if we continue our growth, and the hope is that we do and the plan is that we do, then naturally you’d want to go back into a bit more stable we have a few people here, a few people there. But for the moment, this is working really well for us.”
Trump inauguration was one of highest Reach US traffic days so far
Each site has its own brand identity, with more work to be done on these in the coming months “so that our teams know who they’re writing for,” Wellman said. For example the Mirror is not anti-Trump but is pro-Democrat, while the Express is not necessarily pro-Trump but “pro-conscientious conservative” while the Irish Star embraces “a little bit more fun” and is “somewhat in the middle”, like the Daily Star in the UK.
“When we started here, we had to prove we could get traffic first and foremost, just getting stories up. Now we’ve done that. We’ve proven we can get traffic. We’ve proven we can wash our own face. Now I need to build on that and make sure that the right voices are going out.”
Wellman acknowledges they will “get muscled out” by the likes of CNN and The New York Times on major events but said there is opportunity to do the “breakout” stories differently.
Most of the team’s traffic from Donald Trump’s inauguration in January was coming from the Irish Star via the aggregator Newsbreak. They therefore decided “let’s make sure we prioritise publishing there, because that’s the point where we’re getting most interaction with readers in terms of the stories that everyone will cover,” Wellman said.
But then they did brand-specific stories that fit the voices of each site: for example, anything slightly more anti-Trump went on the Mirror while stories about lip readers’ claims about who said what at the ceremony were published on the Irish Star. This combination led to one of the newsroom’s highest traffic days overall.
Other major traffic-driving events have included the Grammys and the Masters, which along with the inauguration were described by Cascio as “a really nice trifecta of politics, sport and showbiz all working very well.
“But I think the unifying thing behind all of those is these are event-driven programmes where our team has done an excellent job in terms of the planning and the execution and done a very good job collaborating with our team here in the UK.”
‘It’s got to feel like an American voice’
The sites were at first run by “very small” teams including about 12 secondments from Reach in the UK and some local hires. About three-quarters of employees are now American versus British, a 360-degree switch.
Cascio said: “I think the US employees have really brought the local subject matter expertise, whereas the Brits who came over brought a working style. The British tabloid style is much faster than what most US newsrooms are accustomed to.”
Wellman added: “I want it to look authentic to a reader when they come to it, so number one it’s got to feel like an American voice. I know I’m an Englishman sitting there saying that, but it’s very important to me that it feels like it’s written by Americans, for Americans and it’s got the right tone of voice for them on it.”
Some British tabloidisms were causing problems, he revealed, such as the word “row” when referring to an argument. The newsroom has Grammarly accounts to automatically change words and phrases for an American audience in instances like these.
Wellman is most proud of sending people out of the newsroom: for example, a journalist went to the Pennsylvania McDonald’s where Luigi Mangione, the alleged shooter of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson, was arrested in December. They got an interview with someone who witnessed the arrest.
Journalists from the team have also attended the Trump shooting last year, the Republican and Democratic National Committees, the Grammys, the Oscars, the Super Bowl and the NBA finals. Now that they have built a base of traffic he wants to “start bringing in some big hits to the titles”.
Where Reach US brands can grow next: Lifestyle, voices, video, California
Wellman also wants to add new American voices but said “it comes down to if I can get the right voices in to represent us from an opinion-based level, or… if a big event happens, we need a good political voice to come and react for us”.
Cascio teased the growth of underserved content areas like US-specific lifestyle, with strategic hires to be made to support this. “We did not really have a strong evergreen content base, we were much more focused on breaking news and events,” he said. “We felt we were probably under invested in US-specific lifestyle content.”
He cited topics like how to get a tax refund and tips around getting a new type of ID being offered by the Department of Motor Vehicles.
There are also plans to start producing more video content, similar to other brands within Reach making the most of its Studio team and opening of new facilities in the UK this year.
Cascio added that they would be “figuring out where there are more shared interests with the UK where we can build bigger brands that are not necessarily country specific”. This could mean creating football or golf podcasts that appeal to both UK and US audiences.
“We’re looking for those opportunities where there’s connective tissue. And then at a broader level, an investment in video is something that the US is perhaps a bit behind the UK on and that’s something that we’ll be putting a lot of effort into in the remainder of this year, but certainly 2026 and on.”
Wellman also wants to expand the California team to bolster coverage after the New York team clock off.
Overall, he remains optimistic about where the operation can go: “I think the narrative for me is everything is a small step up. I don’t ever want us to take a jump that comes back to bite us in the arse. It’s got to be well thought out, well budgeted and then achievable.
“I’m planning to bring my family out. I wouldn’t bring them out if I didn’t believe in the method the business is going for, which is long term sustainable growth, getting to a point of profitability as a standalone business here that can then reinvest in opportunities and diversification of journalism and referrers and everything like that.”
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