- Reach for the stars… - 24th October 2025
- Feet of clay - 23rd October 2025
- Not free and easy! - 21st October 2025
Today final decisions are being made for the shunting together of pages by journalists on the right-of-centre Daily Express, the left-of-centre Mirror, with the maverick Daily Star to be shacked up to the Daily Record.
But as our Editor, Welshman Phil Parry, who has worked for most of these papers explains, journalists retain loyalty to a title or programme, not a money-saving scheme dreamed up by accountants.
The money men (and they usually ARE men) never learn…
The plain fact is that journalists are incredibly tribal, and retain loyalty to a newspaper title or broadcast programme, NOT a “streamlined system” where your copy is shared to others, which is designed to save lots of money.
I’ve seen it tried many times and it’s always failed!
When I was a reporter on BBC Cymru Wales (BBC CW) Wales Today (WT) in the 1980s I was told to do the piece I was reporting on, also for BBC Radio RW because it seemed like a good idea to managers.
I always tried my best, but many of my colleagues (deliberately or otherwise) couldn’t be bothered.
A natural instinct of reporters is to beat the competition to be first with the news, and unfortunately journalists on RW were in the ‘competition’ category, so you wanted to get your item on air before them, not be one of them!
So it is, with the news that there will be “sharing” of pages by the Daily Express (which has traditionally supported the Tories), and the Mirror (which has traditionally supported Labour) – the Daily Star and Scotland’s Daily Record will be pushed together too.
This has been heralded as a brave new world by the owner Reach PLC and means there will be 600 redundancies.
It is also proposed that NIBs (News in Briefs) will henceforth be written by Artificial Intelligence (AI) bots.
Today we are due to be given more details about this controversial revamp.
Reach PLC (which also owns scores of other titles including the Manchester Evening News, the Birmingham Mail, the Liverpool Echo as well as important Welsh newspapers like the Western Mail as well as the one where I started [then the largest produced in Wales], the South Wales Echo), proclaimed that it intends to make 321 editorial redundancies as part of the “cost-saving”.
Their fate will be decided by executives using a ‘skills matrix’.
Reach PLC, which reported profits of almost £100 million last year, and whose chief executive, Jim Mullen, departed in March, said it was all part of a shift to producing more video and audio content, as well as a live news network.
“Our new structure represents the biggest reorganisation we’ve ever undertaken, even more than in the early days of the digital revolution”, declared the firm’s Chief Content Officer (CCO), David Higgerson.
Mr Higgerson intoned that: “The changes we are seeing in the landscape right now demand a wholesale change in how we operate and how we tell stories. For our editorial teams, we will need to adopt a different way of working from top to bottom, as we match our resources to our ambitions”.
However this ‘wholesale change’ has not exactly been welcomed by all.
Journalists on the Mirror as well as Scottish titles are being balloted on strike action, and Private Eye has described it as ‘sad’.
This could all seem good on paper for the high-ups in a multi-million pound media company, but the journalists don’t like it.
They want to be first with the news – but not news like this!
The memories of Phil’s decades long award-winning career in journalism (which started when he wanted to beat the competition not join it) as he was gripped by the rare neurological disease Hereditary Spastic Paraplegia (HSP), have been released in a major book ‘A GOOD STORY’. Order it now!
