Reach regional brands in UK focus on newsletter approach

An announcement on the Press Gazette site reads:

Nine Reach regional brands have adopted a “newsletter-led approach” meaning the websites are no longer their “flagship” means of content delivery.

The publisher initially trialled this “engagement-first model” with five of its “Live” brands – in Norfolk, Suffolk, Bedfordshire, Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire – beginning in November.

It is now following suit in Berkshire, Hertfordshire, Sussex and Hampshire at the same time as making 200 redundancies across the business, as announced on Wednesday.

There will be no job losses on the four sites changing to the newsletter model, Press Gazette understands.

The new approach means that although these brands still have their own websites, the sites support the newsletters rather than the other way around. This strategy can be particularly successful with hyperlocal stories and means journalists can focus more on stories that are most relevant to a community, Reach said.

The first five sites to pilot the new model met their newsletter page view targets and, in December, grew loyal page views which Reach said it considers an increasingly important metric. For this reason newsletters have been seen as an important pillar of Reach’s customer value strategy seeking to use data to learn more about its audiences.