Reach built a newsroom around the click. Now it’s cutting about 220 editorial jobs and changing what it counts.
The company publishes the Daily Mirror, the Express and dozens of local news sites across Britain and Ireland. On September 16, the Guardian and Press Gazette reported its plans to cut jobs and close three local sites.
Reach’s own half-year figures show the pressure: Google referrals fell 55% in the first half of 2026. Its web audience fell 40%.
Let’s be real about what died here, because it isn’t journalism.
A newsroom built for Google
For years, Reach ran the newsroom Google wanted.
Press Gazette reported that the company gave reporters page-view targets and pushed them to file several stories a day. Reach launched local “Live” sites built to be found: KentLive in 2016, AberdeenLive and GalwayBeo in 2021.
Volume in. Clicks out. Ads on the clicks.
Then the front door moved.
By Press Gazette’s count, Reach employed 4,658 people in 2022, including 3,369 in editorial and production. By the end of 2025, those figures were 3,423 and 2,494.
The September cuts take it lower. Laura Davison, who leads the National Union of Journalists, called the move “an act of self-sabotage.” The Guardian reported that Reach’s share price had fallen 90% in five years.
That isn’t a story about journalists being bad at journalism. It’s a story about a distribution channel that was rented, not owned.
What Reach says it values now
Reach’s chief content officer told staff the newsrooms would put “less emphasis on story volume and more on original journalism and distinctive brands.”
The guiding metric would become “active engaged time” rather than page views.
There it is. Volume was never the value. It was what the traffic model rewarded.
Now the company wants to count whether people stay with the journalism.
The same problem reaches this valley
Pew Research Center followed 900 American adults using Google in March 2025. When an AI summary appeared, people clicked a link in the results 8% of the time. Without a summary, they clicked 15% of the time.
They clicked a source inside the AI summary just 1% of the time.
Chartbeat data reported by Press Gazette in January showed Google search traffic to publishers falling by a third worldwide in the year to November 2025. Separately, organic Google search referrals in the United States fell 38% year on year.
Those are difficult numbers for anyone whose business depends on the click.
That includes publishers here.
USA Today Co., which changed its name from Gannett in November 2025, lists The Desert Sun among its daily papers.
Its chief executive, Mike Reed, told the Wall Street Journal in July that it was “time to take a stand and say enough is enough,” according to Nieman Lab’s account of the Journal’s reporting.
The company said it might cut off Google’s access entirely if search traffic kept falling.
Sit with that. The company behind this valley’s daily paper was weighing whether being found on Google was still worth what Google takes.
I haven’t asked The Desert Sun what that means for the paper here. Nothing in this piece comes from anyone inside its newsroom. Its help center still identifies the site as owned and operated by Gannett.
What I won’t build here
I will not build a local SEO newsroom at AICV News.
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 exists because we counted it.
Local sources. A person talks to us, not to a crawler.
Judgment. An opinion with a name on it.
Relay matters, too. Most readers here don’t subscribe to the sources we read. Passing on useful reporting is a service—as long as we label it and never dress it up as our own work.
And the same facts should be organized well enough that a person can read or hear them and an agent can cite them. Once, rather than stretched into five pieces of commodity content.
That kind of newsroom has a reason to exist even at the bottom of a Google result nobody clicks.
Reach now wants to measure the time people spend with its journalism. That’s the right direction.
It’s also about 10 years late. I’d rather be early.
Update, October 15: Shortened the headline and edited for readability with Sat’s approval. The argument, sources, archive links and reporting limitations are unchanged. This remains a View based on the September reporting.
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.