More than 700 journalists lost their jobs at the publisher of the Daily Mirror last year – staff numbers are down by a third in total since 2016 – but it took the loss of just one to highlight what a mess the company is in. The departure of Alison Phillips as editor-in-chief at the end of this month is “like the ravens leaving the Tower”, as one former executive put it.

Prophecies about the fall of the print kingdom are not new, and readers may struggle to care much about the fate of a tabloid found by a court to have hacked Prince Harry’s phone just last month. Yet the saga of Reach, the publisher of the Daily Mirror and Express, as well as some 120 local newspapers, matters.

For publishing local newspapers – where cuts have been savage – as well as the only national newspaper to have consistently backed the Labour party since the end of the first world war, Reach’s historic titles are particularly important in an election year. Launched in 1903, when most titles were written by and for a narrow elite, the Mirror’s left-of-centre politics and working class support caused historian AJP Taylor to say that “the English people at last found their voice”.

I grew up in a Mirror-reading household, not long after it became the biggest-selling paper in the world with a circulation of 5m. Even by the time Phillips joined the company in 1998, sales had halved to 2.3m, mainly because of competition from the Sun and the Mail. By November last year, when it announced a further 450 job cuts, the........

© The Guardian