Journalism has been in crisis for the entirety of the 21st century, ever since the mainstream adoption of the internet undercut readers’ habit of paying for news. In the 2010s, publishers like Reach — the company that owns The Mirror, Express and Daily Star along with dozens of regional titles — found the best model was to focus on relationships with platforms. Shovel content onto social media sites, craft click-worthy headlines to attract readers, and use the revenue to keep the whole machine turning.
That almost feels like a golden era compared with the situation now. The last few years have seen platforms burn the partnership that had kept publishers’ lights on, through a variety of measures they have prioritised steering users to stay in its walled garden, culminating in the use of AI to now offer publishers’ news and opinions directly without clicking offsite.
That has turned the perma-crisis into an existential one. Industry leaders must now plot a course to not only save the future of their titles but also prove there is a sustainable model for publishing in general.
David Higgerson, chief content officer at Reach, is one of those leaders. He sat down for a Mediachat to offer his diagnosis of the problem, outline the company’s solution, and explain what keeps him passionate about journalism.
Talk me through what a chief content officer is and what your day-to-day role looks like.
I am responsible for finding a future for journalism at Reach. I don’t make the decision about what goes in the titles, it’s really important that our editors do that. I’m here to support them and to make sure that we’re finding ways for our journalism to get to as many people as possible. That’s my job in a nutshell.
On a daily basis, I spend an awful lot of time on data and insights, understanding what’s getting our readers to come back, what they’re enjoying, then working with our editors and specialist experts on delivering that. A big focus at the moment is in expanding our video output. And a big deal for us over the last 12 months has been the push into subscriptions as well. The thing that I focus on every single day is how do I continue moving our organisation from being a pure scale play to a scale and engagement play.
Give me a snapshot description of the state of the business right now.
This is a period of transition for us. For a long time we have focused on page views but the reason that we still get to be here is because we looked at ourselves during the 2010s and realised that we weren’t as relevant as we should be to online audiences. We went through massive changes, first on our regional titles then on the Express and the Mirror.
That scale play worked very well for us, but we’ve always monitored loyalty and engagement. That’s really come to the fore in the last 18 months for us, as Google and others have made life harder to get traffic from there, as well as the shift to people spending far more time on platforms like TikTok and YouTube.
What we found is people are more than happy to visit our journalism when they see it in their feeds, but we have a job of work to do to get people to think about seeking us out. That’s why things like newsletters are so important, why being visible on TikTok is very important, because we’re moving away from a transactional world where we put something out there and somebody clicks on it.
How much do you think audience behaviour change is purely driven purely by platforms changing their policies?
I’m not one of these journalism leaders who just raises an angry fist all the time at platforms. We try to work very closely with Google, Meta, and others. But there’s no escaping that you only have a renting space there for as long as it works for their business models. And they’re focusing much more on engagement than they used to. That’s the big shift.
But it does go beyond that as well. One of the points I always make is we have to remember that we’re not our readers. We gorge on news whereas the vast majority of people don’t. There’s a reason why the two-minute national news bulletin on local commercial radio is still the most accessed news in the country. News avoidance is a big problem.
I have to say that we shouldn’t underestimate the damaging impact the BBC is having on local news as well. They took lots of resources out of BBC Local Radio to essentially create a rival local news text-based service to us and other publishers. That means that, at times, 70% of the journalism the BBC is producing is something we’re also producing as well. That’s competition in the market and, because of the way the BBC is funded, it doesn’t have to worry about adverts and therefore presents a better website. The BBC’s local news market share in England has gone from about 22% to 44% in the last 18 months.
Because the BBC hasn’t got anything like the number of reporters that the commercial publishers have in the local news space, it cherry picks the stories that it thinks are going to be most read. Those are also the stories that the Manchester Evening News, the Liverpool Echo and Birmingham Live are relying on to underwrite all the other journalism that, in isolation, wouldn’t wash his face. And we need to keep doing that to keep communities together.
The BBC is an understated headwind that is really damaging the local news sector.
How much is AI Overviews affecting traffic and revenue?
Piers [North, CEO of Reach] has been very open about the fact that the revenue challenge this year is driven primarily by seeing less traffic from Google. How much of that is AI driven versus changes made to Google Discover is always open for debate. I think Google is trying to make AI Overviews more click friendly, but they’re missing the fact that the primary relationship has been built on: we’ll create the content, you index it, somebody searches for it and they come through to our website.
Google has ridden a coach and horse through that. So AI Overviews has had an impact on traffic, particularly in sports for us now. It has meant that we focus much more on breaking news. A lot of other publishers do more content that is evergreen and they’ve probably been hit a lot harder than us because we do less in that space.
Our bigger challenge with Google is that we see too many cases where they say they want to promote local, to promote the original source of the story, and that doesn’t happen.
The example we often cite is when the synagogue attack happened in Manchester last October. The Manchester Evening News had 28 journalists working on it, at a time when misinformation was swirling around, and we were appearing on the eighth page of Google search results behind newspapers in New Zealand who were just taking AP copy. Though it wasn’t intentional, Google essentially deprived the people of Greater Manchester access to the most reliable information during a civic emergency.
We’ve talked to Google about it — they get it, and they’re trying to fix it, but time and time again we see when we break a big story that we disappear from Google really quickly.
For me, AI Overviews is a fact of life now that Google can do a lot more to support publishers with. But the fundamental challenge still exists around its algorithm and coming good on the things that it wants to do, promoting original, local and trusted journalism. Time and again we find ourselves being squeezed out.
What are some ways you’re most hopeful building your own audience?
The big focus in the last 12 months has been improving the main websites, making them faster and easier to load. There has been a lot of criticism about the heavy ad load on our titles and the user experience not being brilliant. There’s more work going on in that space than ever has been before.
We’re now much more active on platforms that don’t immediately send traffic back to the website, such as TikTok, Instagram and Reddit. We have had 10 years of just being able to post stuff on social platforms and nobody could stop us. Now we have to build a different sort of relationship. We need people to get to know us.
Newsletters are very important as well. They have been for a number of years and we’re currently doing a reset on those because we need to basically drive habit. If people are getting up at seven o’clock in the morning and signed up for the Royal Newsletter, they should expect it to be there at seven o’clock in the morning.
And then, of course, there’s the subscriptions play, which [means] spending more time understanding what people want, and then making sure that we can actively market to them.
Do you agree that journalists need to become personalities now?
I think we’re in a world where it’s not enough to just be from a certain title anymore; we need newsrooms full of people who are known individuals as well. That applies equally to our nationals and our regional titles.
People want to have individual one-to-one relationships. In the world of disinformation, we can’t just really stand up and say, ‘You can trust us, we’re the Mirror, we’re the Express’. It’s so much more powerful when you say, ‘You can trust us, we’re the Daily Express and I’m so-and-so’. So that does create a different dynamic for us and that will bring challenges with it as well.
Overall, I think it’s quite exciting because the reason why a lot of creators are so successful is because people are looking at this avalanche of information coming their way and they’re just looking for something to sift it for them. So there’s lots of opportunity in that.
But I worry that, as an industry, we’ll fall into our usual trap of making everything binary. You’re a journalist or you’re a creator, it’s print or digital, it’s paid for or free. We love beating ourselves up with those arguments while the consumer is just going off doing their own thing anyway.
Are you encountering any issues with advertisers using keyword blocking?
There’s definitely an obsession with not appearing next to the wrong sort of news. What I would say about our journalism is that the topic might not be an uplifting topic from time to time, but: A) people care about it, and B) We’ve always had advertising around that sort of journalism. Indeed, there’s a bulletin halfway through the news at 10 on ITV. But at least when you’re around our journalism, you know it’s been written to a standard, it can be trusted, it’s regulated and we take the relationship with the reader very seriously.
We have our own in-built tool called Mantis, which enables us to deal with some of the keyword blocking. The example that we’ve always given is if somebody banned the word ‘shooting’, that makes sense. But if that bans any story talking about Cristiano Ronaldo shooting while playing for Portugal, that’s just madness.
Equally there are really constructive conversations that come out of that as well. We’re working with advertisers who say, ‘We’d really like to be around this sort of content’. Or when we go back and explain why we do certain types of content, advertisers get it and they want to do different stuff with us.
And one of the great things that we bring to the party is that every large client we work with wants to have relevance within local communities where we can provide that in abundance.
The keyword blocking is something that you’d have hoped as an industry would have solved by now, but I do feel it’s getting better. And there are much more constructive, nuanced conversations that were taking place two years ago.
You’ve worked in news media for more than 25 years. What keeps you passionate about journalism and media in general?
I came into journalism at the age of 18, for a weekly in Preston that doesn’t even exist anymore. It was a brilliant training ground. I kind of stumbled into it after being interested in work experience at a local commercial radio station. They put me in a newsroom there. I became fascinated by the fact that if you tell stories you can actually make a difference — and that’s as important now as it ever has been. It doesn’t just need to be the important serious stuff; it can also be brightening somebody’s day for five minutes with a really inspiring feature or giving them their daily dose of showbiz.
What continues to motivate me is that I want to play my part in making sure that journalism is seen by lots of people, is valued by lots of people and makes a difference in people’s lives.
