Reach cuts 220 jobs, McClatchy 90: newsrooms shed staff, then hire for AI

Reach is Britain's largest local newspaper publisher, and its decision shows how plainly falling search traffic turns into lost jobs. The company will cut 220 editorial positions and close KentLive, AberdeenLive and GalwayBeo. At the same time it will create around 60 new roles. They are not in local newsrooms but in teams handling video, distribution and the use of AI tools.

The publisher itself speaks of a "46 percent year-on-year decline in traffic referred from Google Search". Reach chief Will Higgerson also pointed to growing competition from the BBC, which he called overly expansive in news content. Digital revenue at the group fell to 128.9 million pounds. Its digital subscriber count stalled at 50,000 against a target of 75,000.

"New distribution models ate the visibility"

Reach is not alone. The Next Web reported that in the first half of 2026, traffic referred from Google to publishers fell by 55 percent and overall audience shrank by 40 percent. The company's chief executive said this follows from new distribution models in which users no longer have to visit a site to get an answer.

In the United States, McClatchy carried out layoffs across 13 newspapers in eight states. It owns the Miami Herald and the Kansas City Star, among others. More than 90 journalists lost their jobs, and in some newsrooms the cuts reached 40 percent of the staff. At the Miami Herald, 20 positions were eliminated plus 10 open posts. A newsroom that had close to 300 people at the start of the century now employs fewer than 50.

The next step: an AI editor

The order of events is the most telling part. After a round of layoffs, McClatchy announced it was recruiting editors responsible for AI-generated content. The pattern repeats across the industry. Cuts hit journalistic craft in its classic form. New jobs appear where machine output has to be supervised and optimised.

The Polish thread in this process is the departure of Mateusz Straszewski, an artificial intelligence specialist at Ringier Axel Springer Polska, as part of group layoffs after nearly six years. His role was to roll out AI tools in the newsrooms of titles such as Newsweek Polska, Forbes and Fakt.

The economics are merciless. If the cost of winning a reader through a search engine rises while ad revenue falls with page views, publishers cut their most expensive component: people. The open question is who will write the texts next year that AI is only supposed to summarise. In Britain, the market regulator CMA has said it will decide on AI summaries within nine months. It guarantees publishers the right to opt out of content without losing search ranking. The industry hopes this will at least partly slow the outflow.