Easy pickings for the PR trade this way come.

Reach plc, the regional publishing giant behind the Manchester Evening News, Liverpool Echo and WalesOnline, wants to squeeze yet more work out of already hard-pressed (and possibly depressed) hacks.

We learn that it plans to increase story count to boost traffic – eight stories per day per reporter has been mooted as a target.

One feels sorry for the hacks, but it plainly presents some open goals for flaks.

A reason to think it won’t work is that other publishers have tried it as a strategy and binned it.

The Guardian, the FT, Metro and others have come to realise that more content isn’t the answer here – fewer, better targeted stories are a more likely way forward.

Hacks at the Evening Standard, those that are left, can whack up stories willy-nilly on to the website if they want to look busy.

In terms of web hits, these pieces never work.

An email from Reach reads: “We need to make more of shifts where people are not going out as drivers of volume. In practice, if you’re on a general shift and you’re not on a job, it should be at least eight stories a shift.”

Challenged on the wisdom of this approach in the past, Reach CEO Jim Mullen has replied that since no one has any better ideas, they better suck it up. (I paraphrase, but not much.)

Paul Rowland, another Reach executive, says that rising page views is “the best thing we’ve got right now”, which sounds like a counsel of despair, though I’m sure he didn’t mean it like that.

No one can meaningfully do eight stories a day without quality control becoming a serious issue.

Under such pressure, hacks might decide to cut and paste any old press release that helps them hit their quota.

This might well suit the local PR agency for whom some coverage in say, Kent Live, is just the ticket.

The flaks get to brag to clients about the coverage they achieved and note how many of the words used were the same as the original release. Which just goes to show how good the flaks are…

The problem is that clients might question the value of all this.

And notice that to click on a Reach link is to be bombarded with pop-ups, ads and other distractions that make reading the actual story an endurance test.

Perhaps flaks will revert to old style press cuttings – paper print outs of digital words to show to clients – for that reason.

This whole plan feels a bit behind the times, as well as misery inducing if you’re one of the folk stuck on Grub Street.

It might be handy for parts of the PR trade though, for a while anyway.

Please send candidates for press release of the day to: Simon.english@roxhillmedia.com