Comments on: Job cuts in prospect at award-winning regional daily

By: Also Hanging On

Also Hanging On — Fri, 15 Jun 2012 13:19:11 +0000

@ Hanging on – Derby hasn’t been suffering alone, every Northcliffe centre up and down the country has been taking a battering in every department including Nottingham and Leicester. Nottingham is a shadow of its former self, the only department that hadn’t taken repeated redundancies over the last three-four years was advertising production which was reduced in size by non-replacement of leavers and has now been given the final coup-de-grace by outsourcing ad setting work to India.

Like it or not, no part of the company is immune to the restructuring that is taking place. What it’ll look like in another three-four years? Anyone’s guess…

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By: DAVE

DAVE — Thu, 14 Jun 2012 10:54:38 +0000

How about an investigation by HTFP into ‘invisible’ redundancies?

For instance, two superb and knowledgable librarians from the Nottingham office are being booted out with the archive being transferred to Derby on the Post’s move to a broom cupboard above the local bank.

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By: Hanging on

Hanging on — Wed, 13 Jun 2012 14:54:20 +0000

Naturally, morale at Derby has been further battered by the – not unexpected – news that winning major awards and retaining a circulation proportionately a great deal better than Leicester or Nottingham means nothing to the bean counters.
But I would like to contest what seems to be a growing perception that cuts at Derby “appear to be on a smaller scale than some of its sister titles” as the story above says.
Cuts at Derby started happening a good while ago, a considerable time before the most recent and more widely-publicised cuts at Nottingham and Leicester. These “big” titles appeared to be granted some immunity from the earliest rounds of cuts, despite their poor performance.

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By: Sad state of affairs

Sad state of affairs — Wed, 13 Jun 2012 11:40:23 +0000

This is ludicrous. It really highlights that Northfalloffacliff don’t give a monkey about quality. Any company bothered about the quality of the title would be doing their best to preserve it somehow.

Take note wannabe award winners.. it really doesn’t matter if you bust a gut or sleep on the job, you’re numbers up anyway. So, why bother!

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By: Long Gone

Long Gone — Wed, 13 Jun 2012 10:33:36 +0000

Sad but true: to a Northcliffe head office interested in one thing and one thing only – higher returns from its beleagured centres no matter what the cost – then awards mean nothing. They allow HTFP to highlight cuts to “an award-winning newspaper” but to the men at the top this recognition of a fantastically talented editor and his amazingly hard-working team is a mere bauble. It means the main men will have to drop the Derby team a brief ‘well done’ e-mail before returning to the main business of the day – asking how efforts are going to a) reduce editorial costs to the 16% of revenue target expected of all NML centres; b) ensuring all papers have sold pages 2&3 and the back page off to the highest bidding advertiser.

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