Can Quality Over Quantity Save a Media Giant?
A British media giant’s decision to overhaul its content philosophy could provide answers to some important questions hanging over the media industry.
Last month, Reach PLC announced a major shift in its business model. Though not well known in the United States, Reach is the largest commercial news publisher in the United Kingdom, producing more than 120 online and print publications, including Express, Daily Star, The Mirror, and The Mirror’s US site, which was launched three years ago.
If you click on the links above, you’ll see that most of their national brands follow a tabloid style similar to the New York Post. Yet, the company also operates dozens of local news sites and publications that look like something closer to the local newspapers found in convenience stores across the U.S.
Reach’s business is struggling. The company’s half-year revenues were down significantly in 2026 compared to the first half of 2025 (9% year over year, including an 11% drop in digital revenue). As a result, Reach’s chief executive, Piers North, decided to pivot.
As he unveiled the weak earnings, North announced that Reach would “move away from volume” and instead focus more on original content. In an interview with the UK-based media news website Press Gazette, North said Reach will expand its efforts to sell digital subscriptions, leverage its distinctive brands, and strike licensing deals with artificial intelligence (AI) companies.
Let’s unpack that a little bit.
When North refers to the company’s heretofore emphasis on “volume,” he primarily means two things: volume of advertising views, and volume of content.
Let’s start with advertising. Companies like Reach typically fill their websites with blaring banner ads. Each of those ads earns only a tiny fraction of a cent when a person (or sometimes bot) views it. However, at high volume—thousands or millions of readers seeing dozens of ads each time they visit—the company can begin to make meaningful revenue.
I counted nine ads on the Express homepage when I visited earlier this week, including two ever-present vertical banner ads. If the company had succeeded in getting me to click on one of the stories, I would have seen several more ads, which in turn would have brought another sprinkle of revenue to Reach.
And that’s where the other type of volume comes in. Companies like Reach rely on a high volume of content. According to the Press Gazette article, Reach asks its journalists to produce multiple stories per day. The same was true when I worked at Gannett Co. more than a decade ago. At one point, Gannett asked us to aim to write three short stories each day. Each of those stories translates to a headline, and each of those headlines translates to an opportunity to get users to click on another story and view another raft of ads.
Healthy skepticism
I don’t know much about North or about Reach per se, apart from occasionally clicking over to their websites (usually via a link from Drudge Report). However, there’s reason for some healthy skepticism. Reach’s earnings were, to quote North, “not the outcome we worked towards.” It is not uncommon for corporate executives to use disappointing earnings announcements as an opportunity to unveil a supposed “pivot,” even if the pivot is not particularly meaningful or not particularly well thought out.
Thus, it’s too early to know whether Reach intends a major overhaul of how it operates, or whether the company is merely looking to downplay the long-term importance of volume-based revenue.
A switch from quantity-based revenue to quality-based revenue is a gargantuan task. It involves a significant up-front investment, and it will take months if not years for it to bear fruit.
First, Reach would need to start asking reporters to switch from filing two or three low-quality, clickbait stories per day to filing one or two deeply reported, high-quality stories per week. While that transition takes place, digital revenues would surely drop as the number of clicks on Reach stories inevitably plummets, if only because there are fewer stories on which to click. At some point, the company would need to start moving more and more of this high-quality content (and perhaps some of the clickbait) behind a paywall. However, they would need to time the move exactly right, since most people will not start paying for content unless or until they believe it is truly high quality.
That’s a lot to pull off. It’s costly. And it’s a big risk for a publisher used to relying on relatively easy money.
The bigger picture
If North is serious, and if Reach is willing to make the investment of time and money necessary to transition from quantity to quality, then the company’s experiment could prove consequential. Here’s why: most of the companies that have succeeded with paywalls have done so because they a) have strong legacy brands associated with quality; b) derive significant revenue from ancillary products; or c) do both.
Take the Financial Times, for example. A mere digital subscription comes in at a hefty $45 per month. Yet, people will pay such a high price because they consider the FT’s reporting to be valuable, and because many readers get access through corporate subscriptions. (Their companies also find the FT to be a worthy investment.) Moreover, the company has a booming events business, which likewise generates significant income.
Or look at The New York Times. The company today revealed that it added 280,000 digital subscriptions in the second quarter. Yet, many of those subscriptions are driven not by journalism, but by a desire to play Wordle or read Wirecutter reviews. Notably, both Wordle and the Times’ sports site, The Athletic, were acquisitions and not developed in-house. Wirecutter also generates tens of millions of dollars in revenue through affiliate links.
What Reach is trying to do, though, is different. They want to take the model of high-quality, low-volume journalism and deploy it across a massive network of publications. In the U.S., similar chains like Gannett and Lee Enterprises have chosen a different path, focusing on drastic cost-cutting. The result is near-empty newsrooms producing content that is low in both quantity and quality. Not surprisingly, that business model has proven unsuccessful.
I’m a big believer in local news, but I don’t subscribe to the idea that you should automatically support your local daily. The local dailies in my area are mostly owned by Gannett and Lee, and they long ago lost relevance.
Reach’s apparent decision to switch from quantity to quality could help answer the question of whether, in this modern media economy, it is possible to profitably operate a large network of local news outlets while emphasizing quality. If it’s not possible, it raises another question: Is it worth operating them at all?