Inside Reach's new vision for local news: More video, subscriptions and spending time where people are
Plus: MEN campaign victory, hyperlocal site's new home, Birmingham editor's fight against racist readers, and another government minister dodges local media
Hello,
Welcome to the weekly round up from Behind Local News. Our main feature this week looks at Reach’s new approach to local news, focusing on more video, introducing subscription tiers and spending more where people are congregating away from its websites.
But first - what’s been going on this week?
Thanks for reading,
Behind Local News
In local news this week…
⚠️ The editor of BirminghamLive has urged readers to think about what they’re posting online after being swamped by racist comments about the title’s coverage of Eid.
In an article You can’t be a good person and a racist, sat behind a keyboard or not, Graeme said: “If this city is to remain what it has long been - resilient, diverse, and outward-looking - then we must be willing to say, clearly and without apology: racism is not just wrong.
“Imagine being a child here. Imagine scrolling through your phone and seeing people who don’t know you but denigrate people who look like you. Imagine internalising that, day after day.”
✌️ The Football Association has apologised for its decades-long treatment of Manchester’s ‘football suffragettes’ after a Manchester Evening News campaign.
The Manchester Corinthians spent decades refusing to be beaten by an FA which refused to recognise that football could be a game for women, and their fight has been documented in a new film being aired in Manchester.
The MEN launched its campaign last week, and this week the FA apologised.
The Corinthians: We Were the Champions is directed by former M.E.N. women’s editor Helen Tither for Manchester-based production company Films Not Words. The film is told entirely in the words of the team’s ten surviving players: Myra Lypnyckyj, Anne Grimes, Marlene Cook, Pauline Hulme, Freda Ashton, Monica Curran, Jean Wilson, Margaret Whitworth, Margaret Shepherd, and Jan Lyons.
🫣 Another week, another example of a Government minister doing their best to avoid questions from local journalists.
But the team at the Aberdeen Press and Journal weren’t to be outdone when energy minister Michael Shanks headed North, after weeks of avoiding interview requests as the UK’s energy crisis got worse.
Political editor Denny Andonova and photographer Darrell Benns doorstepped the minister, with the minister arguing the Iran crisis means the UK needs to move away from oil and gas even faster than currently planned.
Ben Hendry, Aberdeen and Aberdeenshire team leader at the P&J said: “It really shows the value of having boots on the ground across the north and north-east.”
☑️ Snapchat has removed a social media ‘news’ brand which was exposed by the Dundee Courier for ‘humiliating’ children and ‘exploiting’ vulnerable individuals in they city.
A week-long investigation by the Courier showed readers how Dundee Rebreak News was having a devastating impact on those it shared footage of.
Other social media giants, like Facebook and Instagram owner Meta and Elon Musk’s X, have been slammed for “turning a blind eye” to the Courier’s findings.
🏅 Local publishers are among those shortlisted for the Nations and Regions prize at the Amnesty International Media Awards.
MyLondon’s Broken Homes series, which recently won at the Regional Press Awards, is shortlisted alongside the Herald’s work to reveal the Scottish councils denying homeless people shelter.
Scottish investigative news site The Ferret is shortlisted for its investigations into far-right agitators in the country, as well as entries from ITV News Anglia about special education needs tribunals, BBC Scotland’s work on kids in psychiatric wards, BBC North West’s probe into so-called gay therapy treatments, two entries from BBC Northern Ireland and BBC Look North’s work on a groomed teenager who ‘married’ their abuser.
Facundo Arrizabalaga is also shortlisted for MyLondon in the photojournalism prize.
The winners will be announced at a ceremony taking place at the BFI Southbank on May 6.
🪣 Local website LancsLive has launched its first ever campaign - backing Blackpool’s bid to become UK Capital of Culture in 2029.
The town is one of nine areas longlisted by the government in a competition open to towns and regions as well as cities. The others are Inverness-Highland, Ipswich, Middlesbrough, Milton Keynes, Portsmouth, Sheffield, Swindon and Wrexham.
The website has launched a petition to show why Blackpool should win - you can sign it here.
✍️ Mill Media has confirmed its next launch will be in Leeds, after more than 500 people pledged to sign up if they launched in the West Yorkshire city.
The company, which already has newsletter-style titles in Manchester, Liverpool, Glasgow, Sheffield and Birmingham, said: “We’re often asked if we’re going to set up a newspaper in Leeds, and now it’s happening. 500 people have pledged to support, so we’re hiring a team, building a website and finding an office. We’ll be launching in May.”
🚛 A hyperlocal website owner has described opening a newsroom in Ipswich as his ‘proudest moment.’
Ipswich.co.uk, run by Oliver Rouane-Williams said he wanted the new office to be proof that his title wasn’t just ‘commentating about Ipswich’s high street’ but becoming part of the solution too.
He said: “The newsroom cements something that has always been true of how we operate: we are not watching Ipswich from the outside. We are part of it.”
The website has been running since August 2024, and boasts 46,000 visitors a month, and 2.2m views on Facebook every month too.
Reach aims for 75,000 subscribers as its new vision for local news takes shape
Publisher Reach, which employs hundreds of local journalists across the UK, aims to have 75,000 paying subscribers to its digital services by the end of the year.
Announcing the company’s full year results, which showed profit up but digital revenue slightly down, chief executive Piers North also revealed the company ended 2025 with 15,000 subscribers, just months after launching its first premium tier on the Manchester Evening News.
It has since rolled out to other Reach titles including the Liverpool Echo, WalesOnline, Daily Record, LeicestershireLive, ChronicleLive and BirminghamLive.
Piers believes the company is well positioned to convert its scale - it reaches 35m people a month in the UK, more than any other publisher, including 29.6m reading its local news coverage - into subscribers.
Piers said: “With a scale audience like ours, even in a modest conversion rate, this can mean a very useful revenue stream in digital. We began rolling this out very quickly from sharing the plan at the end of July.
“As of year-end, we had around 15,000 paid subscribers, which does include some legacy subscribers from early experiments, as well as new paid customers from these launches. It’s worth saying too that this number of subscribers is on top of the 17,000 that we have with our e-edition.”
The launch of Premium on Reach’s titles marked a significant departure from the previous focus on being free to air. Latest data suggests 10% of people in the UK are prepared to pay for news in the UK, rising from around 3% at the start of the 2010s.
To that end, Reach is part of an industry trend, which has seen publishers move from their respective positions of being either paid for, funded by subscriptions, or free-to-air, funded by advertising, to relatively similar hybrid models.
Newsquest boasts more than 100,000 subscribers to its titles, with its newsroom in Glasgow emerging as the powerhouse for this work, with around 50,000 subscribers to its existing titles and new launches. The Southern Daily Echo in Southampton recently said it has accrued 5,000 paying digital subscribers.
DC Thomson has set itself the aim of attracting 75,000 subscribers across its newsrooms in the North of Scotland to fund its journalism into the future, while Iliffe Media, home to titles such as the Bishop Stortford Independent and Kent Online, the best-read local news source in the South East of England, has also launched a variety of paywall options for its diverse titles.
Iconic Media, formerly known as National World, also has digital subscribers to a number of its titles, as does the Belfast Telegraph and Irish News, both in Belfast.
Piers added: “We expect to have at least 75,000 paid subscribers by the end of the year, and during this time, we will continue to finesse our acquisition, as well as of course, our product offering for our readers.”
What does Reach offer?
Reach’s subscription offer is built around premium content and a meter which triggers after a certain number of articles have been read.
Subscribers also enjoy an ad-lite experience, addressing one of the major complaints Reach journalists have experienced in the past.
In Manchester, early premium articles included exposes about social influencer Charlie Veitch and a YouTuber sex offender pushing a camera into the face of unsuspecting passers-by.
Speaking on Radio 5Live about the changes, editor Sarah Lester said: “While we want to keep a lot of our news free, we are charging for some news. We’ve been in a place where people have become too used to news being free. You don’t go into a pub and expect the pint to be free. I need reporters around the clock who can be in court, go to crime scenes and so on, and that costs money.
“We’re saying to readers ‘hang on, you like what we do, so a small contribution to pay. But we accept there will be people who won’t be able to pay, which is why breaking news and a lot of hard news remains free. ”
What’s going on with audience?
The move to ask some readers to pay, along with a greater focus on creating video, comes at a time of great turbulence for publishers when looking at their traditional sources of traffic - especially Google, which has stood accused of harming publishers with the creation of AI overviews, telling stories without sharing traffic, and changes to the Google Discover feed.
The latest Ipsos Iris data - which audits online usage in the UK - showed page views were down significantly year on year.
Yet the number of people accessing Reach’s content across the UK was up year on year in January year on year. Its regional titles, known internally as the Live Network and home to brands such as the Liverpool Echo, BirminghamLive and DevonLive, saw a -1% decline in visitors year on year, driven mainly by a quieter transfer window this January than last.
That compares favourably to other large regional publishers, according to Ipsos Iris, while time spent per visit was up a regional-press leading 21% - showing that a focus on writing longer articles, creating more video and focusing on finding audiences on new platforms was driving up engagement overall.
The Reach presentation to the City shed a lot of light on the challenges facing publishers across the UK.
Piers said: “Like many publishers across our industry, our year was marked by a drop in browser referral traffic in H2. We will always make the most of opportunities from referrals when they arrive, but we’ve only been too aware of how quickly these can change and how fickle they are.
“When we talk about Google, we are mainly talking about Discover and search, and certainly the buzz has been around search, but for us and many publishers, the change has really been in Google Discover, which has had the far greater impact.
“Google is infamously opaque. Our content was doing exceptionally well here, but they are now prioritising more user generated content from the likes of Reddit and indeed their own networks such as YouTube shorts. As a publisher, we are still getting a significant share, but there is less of it to go round.”
But there was good news elsewhere: “We’ve increased our traffic that we get from that, those sources. Referrals from the like of Facebook and WhatsApp grew 21% and now account for nearly a third of our traffic.”
What does good look like in video?
A greater priority is being placed on placing journalism where people already are, be that by producing more video - Reach increased video staffing by more than 100 roles late last year as part of a restructure in which 300 jobs were axed and almost 200 created - and also working with third-party platforms like MSN and Yahoo News.
Around the UK, everyday journalism video teams have been created, blending a range of skills including videography, editing and producing, to ensure stories are told through video - and that stories which work on platforms like Facebook and TikTok are making it on to news lists.
The everyday journalism teams sit alongside investment in Reach Studio, which focuses on series formats designed to attracted big-name sponsors, and the roll out of improved facilities in newsrooms around the UK.
Piers added: “It’s no secret that video has and is important to us reaching new audiences but it’s worth breaking down our activities here as we’ve essentially taken a two-pronged approach.
“Firstly, we’ve built on our expertise and resource, investing in teams in our newsrooms of around four to five specialists, videographers and those people skilled in the art of video.
“These teams are tasked with embedding video in our everyday journalism, and their output is largely short form video. We now create over 300 social videos a day, and we expect this to grow.
“The second piece here is around our in house studio teams and their facilities. These teams allow us to create high quality, bespoken, longer form video content, which helps us attract new audiences with highly engaging content.
“So, something like All Out Rugby League came from a standing start and already has a loyal, engaged audience in the realm of two million monthly views and an average view time of 10 minutes. This prize level of engagement is really attractive to advertisers.”
Piers added: “On platform is still important to us, but it’s essentially we spread our audiences across a wide range of sources, and they’ve upped that promise of being where our audiences are, and that will be through growing our off platform audiences, and that is where video plays its part.”