Metro expands news operation despite falling profits

Metro International is creating a centralised 'content agency' to increase original content across its international editions.

The publisher is looking to recruit up to 12 journalists to staff the content hub, which will focus on material with a global appeal.

The plan will strengthen the publishers central editorial team beyond previous levels, Per Mikael Jensen, the company's CEO, told Journalism.co.uk.

"By the end of the year, our central editorial team will be bigger than the one we currently have. They will be working with content, but not so much news as news tends to be local. Rather they will be looking at issues that are truly global such as environment, health, beauty and celebrity," Jensen explained.

Reports of job losses in its headquarters in London's Fleet Street, which would see 14 per cent of the staff axed, are strictly non-editorial, he added.

The creation of the agency comes despite a reported 83 per cent fall in Metro's year-on-year quarterly operating earnings and weak advertising sales blamed on a depressed market.

More global content is not an attempt to cut costs locally, Jensen stressed, and plans are in place to spend on content for both audiences in the future.

"When competing in the freesheet market you need to make sure you are the paper people pick up first. To accomplish this you need quality. What we are doing is adding content that it will be difficult for our competitors to get, simply because we can offer a truly global newspaper audience. If someone like Al Gore does one interview with us, he'll reach over 23 million people, and that is hard to match," he said.

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