Two of Britain’s biggest newspaper publishers are taking the axe to their US workforces, slashing scores of jobs in the latest evidence of mounting financial pressures across the media sector.
Sky News has learnt that News UK, the publisher of The Sun, and DMGT, owner of the Daily Mail, have this week announced sweeping internal restructurings in their digital operations on the other side of the Atlantic.
Industry sources said on Friday the two companies were cutting significant numbers of employees in the US, where The Sun launched an American edition online four years ago.
By coincidence, the two sets of cutbacks are understood to have been launched on the same day.
DMGT launched Dailymail.com in the US in 2010, and is thought to employ about 200 people there, a reduction from roughly 260 seven years ago.
One insider said the DMGT layoffs represented just under 10% of its US workforce, while the proportion of The Sun’s US staff being let go is understood to be much higher.
A source close to News UK, which is part of Rupert Murdoch’s media empire, denied it was as high as 80%.
The company is thought to employ about 100 people on The Sun’s US platform.
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One media analyst said the redundancies, which have not been announced publicly, were a reflection of the “intense” pressure on news media brands, even in areas where their digital audiences had gained significant momentum.
A spokesperson for The Sun said: “The US Sun has been an incredibly successful business, driving billions of page views.
“However the digital landscape has experienced seismic change in the last 12 months and we need to reset the strategy and resize the team to secure the long term, sustainable future for The Sun’s business in the US.”
A spokesperson for Associated Newspapers, the DMGT subsidiary which publishes the Daily Mail, said in response to an enquiry from Sky News: “We have made a small number of job cuts in some areas of our US editorial department.
“This was a difficult, but necessary decision, which will enable us to continue to invest in areas where we can grow our audience.”