The newspaper industry once leaned so heavily into the power of the office that every major publisher in Britain had an office on the same street. Now, the UK’s newspapers are dramatically cutting the amount of office space they use, or, in some cases, getting rid of that space entirely. Daily Mail & General Trust, or DMGT, the owner of the Daily Mail and Metro newspapers, has taken a new lease on 103K SF at its current building in Kensington, west London. On the face of it, the deal is positive news for the London office market. The lease at the Art Deco Barkers Building is for 15 years and is the largest letting in west London in 2021. But the deal actually sees DMGT reduce the amount of space it occupies in the building by more than a third, from 160K SF to 103K SF. That brings it in line with other newspaper publishers in London and the UK, which have been slashing their office space in the past 18 months. 
The newspaper industry has been suffering financially for more than a decade, and, in many ways, the moves being made by publishers now should be seen in the context of an industry that is taking every opportunity to cut costs. But it also an experiment in whether a sector that has…  Read the full story here. | 
