Reach has started sending more journalists into magistrates’ courts in response to reader demand following the launch of digital subscriptions.
Chief content officer David Higgerson told Press Gazette’s Future of Media Technology Conference in London on Thursday that the premium paywalls now live on 22 Reach websites have led to changes in editorial priorities.
He admitted that investigative journalism that takes longer to produce had become “harder and harder to justify” under the previous page-view-based model but that subscriptions had “opened the door” to doing more of this type of work.
Higgerson was speaking on 10 September, six days before staff were told about plans to cut about 220 editorial jobs and create 60 others – meaning a net loss of around 160 editorial jobs – as a result of a shift in strategy.
Higgerson told staff in a memo that the “massive shift” in audience habits mean Reach “must focus our investment in the areas where our audiences spend the most time and where our revenue reflects the value of our work.
“In our newsrooms, that means less emphasis on story volume and more on original journalism and distinctive brands. It also means that ‘active engaged time’ will become our north star metric, over and above page views, by the end of the year.”
Higgerson’s comments at the conference reflect the changes being made as part of this restructure.
Manchester Evening News was the first Reach website to add a paywall for some content, with fewer adverts, in November. It has since been joined by other regional brands such as Wales Online, the Liverpool Echo, Belfast Live, Bristol Live and the Nottingham Post, as well as all Reach national brands including the Mirror and Express.
Reach now has more than 50,000 paying digital subscribers across the portfolio and is targeting 75,000 by the end of the year.
Court, football, business and political content part of Reach subscriptions drive
Asked what was driving to people to pay for a digital subscription, Higgerson told the conference: “Probably the universal success we’ve seen across the company is court content, particularly magistrates’ court content as well. So you can see that starting to change some of our decision-making in some of our newsrooms.”
Higgerson said commercial colleagues may be nervous about the idea of covering more crime because of brand safety concerns – some marketers still see news as “unsafe” and use blocklists to stop their ads from appearing alongside certain types of content, despite this idea being debunked.
“But yes, we do have editors who are making decisions differently based on the fact that they think things will convert for subs,” Higgerson said.
He also cited football club content: “Not just the run-of-the-mill stuff, but we have a lot of competitors in the sports space who almost pride themselves on the fact they never pay to send somebody to a football match. Well, we’re making a virtue of the fact we are still sending people to every one of the major clubs that we cover. So that’s an area that’s working.”
Higgerson continued: “I think it’s been well trialed in places like Manchester, Liverpool, Birmingham, Wales – some of that deep investigative work as well lands really well. And that’s not to say we weren’t doing that previously, but it was becoming harder and harder to justify because often that sort of journalism wasn’t reaching the sort of audience in terms of its size to enable us to continue doing it. Subscriptions has opened the door for us to do that.”
Reach announced last month it is hiring four new regional business editors to be based in Birmingham, Glasgow, Liverpool and Manchester. Five regional business editors left Reach in widespread redundancies at the end of 2023.
Higgerson said: “Those are roles that two years ago, we wouldn’t have been able to justify creating – I would have loved to have justified creating them, but we can now justify creating them because we’re seeing both success with that content through a subscription lens, but also through the amount of time people are spending with it as well.”
He added that hiring business editors was not “just a case of going back to what we previously did” because pre-online it was about CEO interviews and FTSE announcements, and later on they were often contending with PRs “trying to use the business journalism pages to basically get free PR”.
He explained that Reach is now aiming to “create journalism that helps cement the brand at the heart of the community, tells people what’s going on in the business community, but crucially explains to everybody else why it matters to them as well”.
Reach is also creating three new regional political correspondent roles.
‘What are the five or six things each brand is going to be famous for?’
Over the summer, Higgerson said, editors around Reach decided “What are the five or six things that each brand is going to be famous for?” This has been checked against subscriptions data and is guiding content plans for the final months of the year.
He said this meant they also drew up a “stop list” of content for their newsrooms, including trending content that no longer drives referral traffic from Google Discover and Facebook like it used to.
Higgerson said a focus on scale had “worked for us for a long time” but the shift away from volume had been necessary because the “main referrers are doing a lot more to keep their audiences on their own platforms”.
He added that the publisher still reaches the same number of people in the UK per month as it did a year ago – about 35 million. “But people are less likely to see us, so they’re less likely to come back at the moment.”
The shift, he said, has been around “making sure that we take our brands to a place where people are waking up in the morning or at whatever point of their day, thinking to themselves ‘I need to go and spend some time with one of our brands'”.
Higgerson said Reach accepted that most people would never pay for local news, and that it should therefore keep the bulk of its news offering free to read.
They therefore needed to work out, he said, “how do we make sure that we can actually provide that local news?
“And that’s where feedback from our readers has been very strong that they don’t like the number of adverts, for example, and other elements that are on our pages. So there’s an opportunity for you to pay to have an ad-light version.
“The premium side of things has enabled us to identify areas of content where we think people will pay for a much deeper, richer experience in the content.”
‘Here’s the thing that’s going to connect you to the community’
This also includes a new strategy being trialled on two smaller newspaper titles that have not previously had a dedicated website: The Journal in Newcastle and The Southport Visiter. This is going ahead despite the widespread editorial changes that have since been announced.
Higgerson said Reach moved away from having individual sites for many of its regional newsbrands years ago, instead often bringing several together into its ‘Live’ brands named after the county or city, because “you end up with a lot of websites that don’t get the TLC they deserve, or you end up with editors who are spending time having to do website management when they really should be focusing on the content for their newsrooms”.
Now, however, he said these brands can be positioned as a paid-for newsletter with associated social content as the way people can be most in touch with their direct local area.
“Essentially what we’re saying to the people of Southport is we know you want to be connected to your community, we know you value the Liverpool Echo for the bigger stuff, but here’s the thing that’s going to connect you to the community six days a week.
“The opportunity for the editors doing those newsletters is that they just leave the newsletter with what’s interesting every day, and that doesn’t have to follow the news agenda. That can just follow what’s interesting in Southport, what’s interesting in Ayrshire, what’s interesting to the political leaders and shakers and the business people of the North East every day.
“We think if we get it right for launch, there’s dozens more places that are ripe for this, both within our existing portfolio and adjacent to some of our bigger titles.”
Alongside the subscription strategy, Higgerson said is putting a “much greater focus” on off-platform video on Youtube where he said growth had contributed to maintaining Reach’s 35 million total UK reach.
Reach’s video shows currently include the Daily Expresso which just marked a year since launch and has become one of the UK’s biggest news podcasts on Youtube, the Mancunian Way at the MEN and All Out Football. A new show is said to be coming from the Mirror within weeks.
Higgerson said the aim is to work these into the subscriptions model to make sure “connection with individual journalists” is “at the heart” of what people are paying for.
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