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Newsquest has said it will create 50 digital journalist jobs as its subscriptions success has led it to invest £1.5m per year in local journalism.
The roles include 32 NCTJ-qualified digital journalists to be based in Newsquest’s newsrooms in Glasgow, North Wales, Essex, Hampshire, Dorset, Bolton, Lancashire, Darlington, Durham, Yorkshire, Hereford, Wales, Somerset, South London, Sussex, Worcester, Oxford, Wiltshire, Buckinghamshire, Berkshire and Cumbria.
They will earn between £20,000 and £25,000 per year and the job ads indicate they “won’t be stuck at home” but will continue to work in local newsrooms post-Covid.
Three digital sports journalists will also be appointed in Bolton, Glasgow and Southampton.
Fifteen further jobs will come from a new regional content SEO team – 14 journalists and one editor – to be based in newsrooms in Scotland, Wales, Essex, South Coast, North West, North East, London, Midlands, Oxfordshire, Wiltshire and Cumbria.
Newsquest put around 40 journalism jobs at risk last year, mainly in sports and photography, plus more in advertising sales following “heavy declines” in ad revenues in the first months of the Covid-19 pandemic.
However it is seeing success with its digital subscriber model which rolled out in April last year across more than 60 of its larger websites, placing some content behind a paywall and keeping some other – such as core Covid-19 news – free to read. A number of Newsquest sites had already been using the approach with “encouraging results”.
Newsquest last week appointed its first head of digital subscriptions, with Gerard O’Brien joining from Future where he was consumer marketing director.
[Read more: Digital news subscriptions top 23m, Press Gazette research finds]
Chief executive Henry Faure Walker (pictured) said: “The focus that we have placed on growing engaged local digital audiences over the last few years is paying off, with most of our sites now reaching almost 80% of their local population.
“This coupled with the success we are having with digital subscriptions gives us the confidence to launch a major expansion in local journalism.
“This investment underlines our commitment to those towns and cities where our local brands have been the number one news provider for decades. We look forward to welcoming new talented digital journalists to join our teams in local newsrooms embedded in communities up and down the country.”
Newsquest group product director Simon Hill said last week there has been “impressive growth across our new and established subscription-focused titles, significantly ahead of our expectations”.
He said O’Brien would bring “the senior leadership and marketing expertise we need to continue this growth. His experience across such a wide range of publishing sectors, business models and communities are exactly the right fit to lead our acquisition, retention and data strategy”.
Newsquest is simultaneously upping investment in its digital product team, creating new jobs for data analysts and web developers to work on its local news platform.
Newsquest is owned by US parent company Gannett, which has more than 1.1m digital subscriptions across its portfolio of news brands as publishers across the Atlantic also pursue reader revenues in the face of falling ad revenues.
Newsquest’s main rival Reach, the UK’s largest commercial and regional publisher, announced its own plans for a recruitment drive creating more than 50 local journalism jobs last month.
In total this will take the number of jobs created for Reach’s Live regional news network since the start of 2020 to 170 – although 550 jobs were lost across the company in a restructure last summer.
Press Gazette analysis last week showed how traffic to UK local news websites surged last year but advertising revenues failed to follow.
Digital advertising revenues for regional news brands fell by 23.3% to £183.3m even though online display revenue overall (including news brands, Facebook and Google) was up 10.4% to £7.07bn.
Picture: News Media Association
The post Newsquest jobs: Regional publisher to put £1.5m a year into digital journalism following subscriptions success appeared first on Press Gazette.
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