Reach Cuts 160 Editorial Jobs And Swaps Page Views For "Active Engaged Time"

Reach, the UK's largest commercial news publisher, is planning to cut about 220 editorial jobs and create 60 new roles, a net loss of roughly 160, while closing three online-only brands: Kent Live, Aberdeen Live and Galway Beo. Chief content officer David Higgerson told staff the North Star metric is shifting from page views to "active engaged time" by the end of the year, a major change for a publisher that has long prioritised volume. The trigger is referral decline from Google's Discover algorithm changes and AI Overviews, compounded by what Higgerson called "an expansionist BBC, whose local output mirrors what is already being created by publishers by us up to 70% of the time." Reach now has more than 60,000 paying subscribers across 22 titles, up from a standing start less than a year ago, and is betting subscriptions and longer-form video, not traffic, are where sustainable revenue lives.

The crux

Reach is making the clearest statement yet that the page-view era is over for local news, and it is willing to pay for the transition with 160 jobs and three market exits while pivoting the entire newsroom's incentives to engaged time.

Sell-side read

The metric change matters for every publisher selling against Reach: when the market leader stops optimising for reach, engagement quality and first-party subscription revenue become the benchmark, and advertisers will increasingly be sold attention and loyalty rather than cheap impressions.

Watch

Whether "active engaged time" is accepted by advertisers and agencies as a tradeable currency, or remains an internal editorial metric with no buy-side uptake.