An award-winning local newspaper reporter has launched an excoriating attack on Trinity Mirror for reducing his paper to “listicles…scraped from the website”.

Gareth Davies took voluntary redundancy from the Croydon Advertiser in June. The company was apparently happy for him to leave, despite the fact that the 29-year-old has won regional press awards weekly reporter of the year four times.

The Croydon Advertiser is one of 80 former Local World titles which were taken over by Trinity Mirror last November in a deal which made the Daily Mirror publisher by far the UK’s largest local press group.