More than 700 journalists lost their jobs at the publisher of the Daily Mirror last year – staff numbers are down by a third in total since 2016 – but it took the loss of just one to highlight what a mess the company is in. The departure of Alison Phillips as editor-in-chief at the end of this month is “like the ravens leaving the Tower”, as one former executive put it.
Prophecies about the fall of the print kingdom are not new, and readers may struggle to care much about the fate of a tabloid found by a court just last month to have hacked Prince Harry’s phone. Yet the saga of Reach, the publisher of the Daily Mirror and Express, as well as some 120 local newspapers, matters.
For publishing local newspapers – where cuts have been savage – as well as the only national newspaper to have consistently backed the Labour party since the end of the second world war, Reach’s historic titles are particularly important in an election year. Launched in 1903, when most titles were written by and for a narrow elite, the Mirror’s left-of-centre politics and working class support caused historian AJP Taylor to say that “the English people at last found their voice”.
I grew up in a Mirror-reading household, not long after it became the biggest-selling paper in the world with a circulation of 5m. Even by the time Phillips joined the company in 1998, sales had halved to 2.3m, mainly because of competition from the Sun and the Mail. By November last year, when it announced a further 450 job cuts, the Mirror was selling just 245,829 a day.
Soon after Phillips’ arrival came the internet, the atomic bomb for newspaper business models in general and, it seems, the Mirror in particular. While a crisis in trust online is endemic, some of the newspaper’s travails have been self-inflicted, notably an overreliance on digital advertising revenues alone. Its reaction to a revolution also shows why newspaper ownership really matters.
While the Mail and the Sun have flirted with paid-for online models, Reach is almost entirely reliant on digital advertising revenues. Since arriving as CEO in August 2019 from gambling group Ladbrokes, Jim Mullen has incentivised reporters with targets based on the numbers of clicks they have to achieve, for example, as well as introducing AI bots to write stories. In an email to all staff the day after Phillips’ departure was announced, Mullen said page views would continue to be important despite a 16% decline in six months last year, mainly owing to Facebook changing the way it sent viewers to newspapers.
Mullen told staff there would be no further job cuts this year. Yet the outlook looks gloomy given the declining number of print readers. As one local journalist put it: “Our only hope is that Facebook reprioritises news.” Which is not much of a hope at all. Douglas McCabe, chief executive of Enders Analysis, calls the focus on social media and search for newspaper revenues a “flawed strategy” – and it’s hard not to agree.
The group is still the fourth biggest news website in the UK after BBC News, The Sun and Mail Online. The problem is that the advertising alongside those page views pays nowhere near as much as print advertising once did.
Partly to counteract the shortfall, as well as increased print costs, newspaper cover prices shot up by 13% just last year. The Mirror now costs its dedicated but dwindling band of cash-strapped readers £1.40 a day, compared with £1 for the Sun. Reach’s last set of accounts make for grim reading.
Hence the job cuts. Phillips is understood to have chosen to go rather than preside over any further cuts in local coverage or expensive but award-winning journalism such as the Partygate scandal. The exit of a national editor may have prompted headlines, but losses in local papers come at just as high a cost. On Wednesday, fans protested the loss of a dedicated football reporter for West Bromwich Albion at Birmingham Live. If no one is dedicated to following the fortunes of a Championship football club, what hope for dedicated court or local council reporters?
Increasingly, a rebrand of the many historic titles owned by Reach – with a “Live” website for places as diverse as Edinburgh, Belfast, Teesside, Devon and Leicestershire, as well as Birmingham – allows for universal celebrity content that can be produced anywhere.
The other issue for the Mirror, alone among papers once called “the popular press” in not backing Brexit, has been a post-2016 landscape that has hyped up an anti-woke and anti-immigration agenda. In an online world where hate and outrage sells, a nervousness about attacking the EU, for example, cannot have helped.
Reach is hardly alone in struggling with an online world that does not prioritise fact-based reporting. News Corp cut 1,250 jobs around the world last year, according to the Press Gazette. Yet Mullen faces an additional challenge in having to provide quarterly updates to shareholders, who worry not just that phone hacking has cost it its once-great reputation, but also millions in legal fees and payouts, while a pension fund deficit has to be plugged with £46m a year until 2028.
Media owners like Rupert Murdoch or Lord Rothermere, who took his Daily Mail-owning newspaper group private at the start of 2022, and of course the Gulf billionaires interested in buying the Telegraph, are unlikely to sell up on the basis of a few disappointing years if they believe in a company’s long-term future. Not to mention the power that comes with owning a newspaper title.
The decline of newspapers is not new, but it will still feel bleak until a reliable source of funding for proper reporting is more readily found. Signs of hope are provided by brilliant local news ventures including the Mill in Manchester and the Scottish Beacon group, but it’s still hard not to worry about the future of mass market news that isn’t from just one plutocratic viewpoint and local news that isn’t provided by a machine. Happy 2024, everyone.
Jane Martinson is a Guardian columnist and author of You May Never See Us Again: The Barclay Dynasty
This article has been amended to correct the inception of the Mirror’s support for Labour to after the second world war
