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Chasing the ad revenue

Reach:

When bosses at Reach, the publisher of the Mirror and Express newspapers, told journalists last week they were expected to write eight stories a shift, many former staff members were quick to share their war stories.

In an email to staff seen by The Telegraph, one senior Daily Mirror executive said the newspaper was aiming for a “baseline” of 12,500 page views on an article within 48 hours of publishing.

Not bad, can be done.

OK, so they chase page views and ads. No subscription, no paywall, they’re chasing clicks from he search engines. 8 pieces? Not difficult in hte slightest. 8 good pieces? Ah, well….

But here’s the problem with this. To get the clicks you want, of course, to be addressing the world. Global stories. More than anything else you want to get into the US clickbait market.

But Reach is a collection of UK local newspapers.

It’s – sorta and more than a bit – the wrong strategy for the wrong assets.

4 thoughts on “Chasing the ad revenue”

  1. This means no time to do anything except rewriting press releases and newswire reports. I know local journalists are cheap but surely you could outsource this to the Philippines (better English than in India)? Or use AI? You might even free up resources to fund a reporter who goes out to talk to people and find stories that way.

  2. LLMs are perfect for this sort of thing. It doesn’t matter that much if it’s wrong, does it? It’s not like Decanter or steam railway magazines where the audience cares about accuracy and useful/interesting content.

    At which point, you can have people in the Phillipines doing it. That ad revenue isn’t going to stay with you for long, because people will just use ChatGPT to generate articles.

  3. Is this the Doctorow’s ‘enshittification’ playing out at Reach? Mindless churnalism that no human needs to write and no human wants to read? Surely, that is the logical endgame with this strategy, content by bots for bots?

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