Weekly Digest: Reach’s US expansion, NYT continuous growth

Reach, one of Britain’s largest newspaper publishers that owns titles like the Daily Express and Daily Mirror, is expanding its presence in the United States. This week the company appointed its launch editors for Mirror US and Express US – Alex Wellman and Karl Holbrook respectively.

The company is also launching the Irish Star, a publication aimed at the Irish-American population. Reach will launch wider recruitment in the US, expecting the staff on the US editions to hit 100 by the end of 2023, PressGazette reports citing the company. These roles have not been affected by recent layoff plans.

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The New York Times once again showed healthy growth last quarter, beating Wall Street expectations and compensating for the ad market slowdown, thanks to the rise in the sales of bundled subscriptions. 

In recent years the company has increasingly invested in non-news products like cooking and games, making them an important part of NYT‘s proposition. In the fourth quarter the publisher gained 240,000 digital-only subscribers; in 2022 overall it added over a million subscribers, the result second only to the 2020 pandemic-induced subscription boom.

The company reported an adjusted operating profit of $347.9 million for 2022, with overall revenue reaching $2.3 billion, which marks an increase from the previous year.

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A study of US journalists’ activity on Twitter reveals that they post only slightly less than before the platform was acquired by Elon Musk, despite publicised pledges to forego the platform in the wake of the controversies brought about by the new owner.

Research from the Tow Center for Digital Journalism shows that “only a small handful have deactivated their accounts and the number of daily tweets has decreased just 3 percent overall”.

Interestingly (although somewhat intuitively), there’s a gap between posting by journalists from left-leaning publications and right-leaning ones, with the former reducing their activity to a greater extent and the latter ramping up their tweeting. 

Bonus — Three more stories you might want to check out:

• Bloomberg: Russia’s Information War in Ukraine Includes Spoofing Foreign Media
• The New York Times: Vox Media Is Raising $100 Million From Penske Media
• The New York Times: Gawker, the Irreverent Gossip Site, Will Be Shuttered Again

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