Douglas McCabe was quoted in an article on The Guardian plan to create a joint commercial sales operation. The UK newspaper is to press ahead talks to form an unlikely alliance with Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp to sell advertising. The plan, now known as project Arena, was a direct response to the alarming decline in print advertising revenues that has been upending the newspaper business. GMG is one year into a three-year reorganisation to slash costs and reduce heavy losses that had at one stage threatened the future of the organisation. But cash outflows in its past financial year were £67.3m — only slightly down from £72.3m in 2015/16. A total of 300 jobs went in a shake-up across the group, while The Guardian is set to go to a tabloid format from the first quarter of next year, a move that will save the business between £5m and £7m a year in 2018/19. Douglas said that to break even by 2019, the business would have to find a “further £45m of savings over the next two years”.