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Award-winning editor to move on in shake-up

An award-winning weekly editor is moving to a new role as part of a fresh shake-up at a series of London weeklies.

Tim Cole, left, is stepping down after nine years as editor of the Willesden and Brent Times, which will now come under Hampstead and Highgate Express editor Geoff Martin.

He is moving across London to become deputy to Malcolm Starbrook, who has been made group editor of the East London Advertiser, Hackney Gazette and The Docklands.

The moves come as publisher Archant London continues to make cutbacks, with four trainee reporters’ roles in North London currently at risk of redundancy.

Tim was highly commended in last year’s Amnesty International Awards for his newspaper’s successful Justice for Dad campaign to free a British man held at Guantanamo Bay.

In 2006, he received a Lord Mayor’s Award for three years of work helping to establish a newspaper supplement written by pupils from a number of schools on his patch.

He said: “I’ve enjoyed my stay at the Times immensely and am particularly proud of the work we did in helping to bring one of the British Guantanamo Bay prisoners home after a long campaign.

“East London is a great news area and I am looking forward to joining the team.”

In addition to the changes at senior level, four trainee reporters’ posts across a series of titles including the Times, Ham&High, Hornsey Journal and Islington Gazette are to disappear with the number of trainees reduced from ten to six.

Archant has confirmed that three of the trainee reporters affected are taking voluntary redundancy, while the other is moving to the East London papers to take up a vacancy there.

In a statement, the company said the editorial re-structure will also see the voluntary departure of two sub-editors and a sports editor.

In an internal memo seen by HoldtheFrontPage, the company says the reduction in size of the majority of titles and the number of change pages being produced has resulted in a need for fewer personnel within the news team.

The latest moves follow a series of newspaper office closures earlier this year as part of a plan to consolidate the company’s operations in three centralised news hubs.

All the North and West London titles are now based at the Ham&High offices at Avenue Road, Swiss Cottage – once the HQ of Thomson Regional Newspapers – while similar hubs are being created in Ilford and Hackney.

Comments

Golam Murtaza (18/06/2009 10:14:19)
I’m confident that HTFP always makes the effort to get official comment from the company execs whenever more newspaper staff lose their jobs. And I think the constant refusal of these highly-paid suits to make any comment is a disgrace. I can only hope a few more of them end up on the scrapheap themselves, along with the employees they have previously fired. That will be some, small consolation.