The boss of the publisher behind the Daily Mirror has seen his pay more than double despite anger among staff over recent job cuts.
Jim Mullen, the chief executive of Reach, which also owns the Express and regional titles such as the Manchester Evening News, took home £1.25m last year after he was awarded the maximum possible bonus of £662,000.
That was up from £564,000 in 2023, when the newspaper boss agreed to forgo a bonus and increase to his base salary.
Mr Mullen’s bonus is more than a thousand times larger than the £600 payment handed to roughly 3,300 staff members this month.
The pay rise has fuelled anger among staff at Reach, who are still reeling from the impact of deep cost-cutting at the publisher.
Reach slashed almost 800 jobs in late 2023 in the industry’s biggest round of annual cuts for decades as it struggles to adapt to the digital era. Unlike many rival publications that have adopted a subscription model, Reach remains heavily reliant on dwindling advertising revenues to keep its websites free to view.
Remaining staff have complained of pressure to pursue “clickbait” stories and churn out an increasingly large number of articles, with journalists judged on individual online targets.
One journalist said: “It’s fair to say morale is still on the floor with hundreds of staff who remain uncertain of the future of their jobs or how they will further change on any given week.”
The National Union of Journalists (NUJ), which is in negotiations with bosses over a below-inflation pay increase of just 2pc, urged the company to reconsider its offer.
The Reach NUJ group chapel said: “It is good news that the business 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.
“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.”
Mr Mullen, the former Ladbrokes boss who joined Reach in 2019, has previously come under fire for his pay awards. The newspaper boss attracted criticism from the National Union of Journalists after he took home more than £4m in 2021.
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