Reach pivots to court and investigative reporting to feed subs

Reach chief content officer David Higgerson says digital subscriptions, now live on 22 titles and past 50,000 paying subscribers, have "opened the door" to investigative and court reporting that the old page-view model could no longer justify. He told Press Gazette's Future of Media Technology Conference that magistrates' court content has been the "universal success" across the portfolio in driving conversions, alongside football and business coverage, and that Reach is hiring four regional business editors and three regional political correspondents. The trade-off is real: Reach announced plans to cut about 220 editorial jobs and create 60 others, a net loss of around 160, as it shifts from volume to originality. "Active engaged time" replaces page views as the north star metric by the end of the year. Higgerson concedes commercial teams get nervous about crime coverage because of brand-safety blocklists, but the subscription data is overriding that hesitation.

The crux

Subscriptions are rewriting editorial priorities at scale, because the content that converts a paying reader, court, football and investigative work, is not the content that won under a volume model.

Sell-side read

This is the clearest live example of "value, not volume" working in regional news, and it carries a direct commercial lesson: brand-safety blocklists are still suppressing the exact journalism that drives the highest-intent, highest-value audiences.

Watch

Whether Reach hits its 75,000-subscriber year-end target and whether "active engaged time" spreads to other UK publishers as their primary metric.