"We expect to be making an announcement shortly regarding another airline serving North America non-stop from Birmingham"
The return of Bangladesh perhaps ?
In the time the Birmingham to Newark route has been going, we've seen recessions, credit crunches, 9/11, record fuel prices and competition on the route from other carriers, and CO/UA have always come out the other end maintaining the route in some form...
Maybe UA (and AA) have finally started to realize that better competition is now coming to the UK regions in the shape of Norwegian, Virgin, TCX and they need to either lift their game - which means spending a lot of money in newer aircraft and service improvements - or give it away and retreat to their main strongholds LHR, EDI and MAN. Seems like they've looked at the numbers and decided on the latter. I wouldn't be surprised to see them retreat even further in the medium term.
As Skipness pointed out it was Continental that originally established a game changing network of UK gateways in the days when they were prevented from serving LHR. UA have never really seemed quite as interested.