“This is poor reward for their part in the business turnaround.”
Staff at Reach, the UK’s largest commercial news publisher, each received a £600 bonus in recognition of the company’s 2024 profit growth of 6 percent, which reached £102.3m.
Jim Muller, meanwhile, the publishing giant’s chief executive, was paid £662,000 in total bonuses. Bonuses are paid each March to around 3,300 members of staff at Reach, who work for company’s 120-plus media brands, including the Mirror, the Express, Daily Record and Daily Star, to local brands like MyLondon, BelfastLive and the Manchester Evening News.
Part of the growth has been attributed to AI-written articles, which are reviewed by journalists before publication, driving 1.8 billion page views in the year, as Mullen explained.
In 2024, Reach staff had a 5 percent pay rise, taking the minimum salary for a senior journalist to £32,760. Mullen and Reach’s chief financial officer Darren Fisher also received pay rises of 5 percent last year, taking their salaries to £529,646 and £378,000 respectively.
As the Press Gazette reports, Reach’s executive directors are receiving their first bonuses in three years after no extra payments were made in 2022 or 2023.
Mullen and Fisher are both receiving a cash bonus of 50 percent of their base salary as well as a bonus deferred share award, of 75 percent and 50 percent of base salary respectively, that they can cash in the shares in three years.
This year, staff are set for a 2 percent annual pay rise this year. But the National Union of Journalists (NUJ) is urging the company to ‘urgently reconsider’ this.
The NUJ said it, “stresses Reach must also meet its obligation to current employees, who have been central to the company’s success by offering a pay award that reflects the true value of their work.”
In a statement, the Reach NUJ Group Chapel said that it is good news that Reach has turned around its key digital revenues and has improved its operating profits out of which these bonuses will be paid.
“But this was done on the back of heroic efforts by employees to dramatically increase the number of stories going online and by those in print outperforming the market with threadbare resources thanks to significant redundancies.”
The union is currently consulting its members over a pay offer from management of just 2 percent, which it describes as equating to a pay cut when inflation is taken into account.
“This is poor reward for their part in the business turnaround.”
“The one-off staff bonus that has been paid is non-consolidated and while any additional sum is of course welcome, it does nothing for meeting the financial challenges members and their families face for the future…
“Our members will not have a problem with success being appropriately rewarded, but they do expect fairness and deserve better in 2025 – especially as the promising upturn in digital revenues is continuing into this year and recent big cost items such as legal costs for unlawful news gathering cases and drop in newsprint expenditure is falling away.”
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