The publisher of the U.K.’s Mirror and Express newspapers reported a loss of more than £100m ($129 million) in the first half of the year, according to the UK Guardian.
The loss came after the publisher, Reach, wrote down the value of its 160 local papers by £150m ($194 million).
The move drove Reach to a pretax loss of £114.3m ($148 million) in the first six months of the year, compared with a £38m ($49 million) profit in the same period last year.
Reach’s properties include the Manchester Evening News, Birmingham Mail and Liverpool Echo.
Reach purchased the Express and Star titles from media mogul Richard Desmond in spring.
“It is about the print assets,” said Simon Fox, chief executive of Reach. “In terms of our regional digital strategy we are going into cities where we never had a print presence, like Leeds, and we are about to open in Edinburgh. Those are unrelated to the print assets we hold.”
The company also had a drop in the growth of digital display and transactional revenue. The company pointed to algorithm changes by Facebook and Google for the drop.
“It was mainly Facebook but also a little bit Google,” Fox said. “Our ambition is for 20 percent digital growth so 11.5 percent is not good enough,” Fox said of its reported results.
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