A six-year study of Reach plc has put hard numbers on what many in local news have long suspected: that original, local reporting is being squeezed out of Britain's biggest local newspaper group. We put the findings to an independent hyperlocal, a rival publisher, and Reach itself
There's a new study on Reach plc, the biggest local newspaper publisher in the UK, and it's got people across the industry talking. It's a big, careful piece of research that looks at six years of data, 55,332 articles and 27 titles, and it lands on a conclusion that will sound familiar to anyone who's watched their local paper change over the past decade: the local, original journalism is thinning out, replaced by content that could have been written about anywhere.
We wanted to know what people actually working in local news made of it, so alongside the findings themselves, here's what four people close to this story, from an independent hyperlocal, a national challenger brand, a privately-owned regional outlet, and the publisher named in the debate, had to say.
First, a bit of background. Researchers Simona Bisiani, Agnes Gulyas, Bahareh Heravi and colleagues sampled Reach titles monthly in 2019, 2022 and 2025 and tracked three things: how much content was original rather than shared, how much was genuinely local, and how much covered what they call Critical Information Needs: civic affairs, crime, health, education, transport. In other words, the categories communities need to participate in public life.
