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Union hits out over ‘brutal’ Johnston Press changes

The National Union of Journalists has called on Johnston Press to give assurances over the editorial quality of the Yorkshire Post and Yorkshire Evening Post after it was announced that their editorships are to be combined.

Yesterday’s move by the regional publisher, which has placed YP editor Peter Charlton and YEP counterpart Paul Napier at risk of redundancy, was condemned as “shocking” by the union.

Union representatives have now been invited to meet Helen Oldham, managing director of the Yorkshire publishing unit, who announced the decision.

The union said it would be using the meeting to ask her reconsider the changes which it said would have consequences for all staff at the Leeds-based titles.

A statement issued by the YP/YEP joint NUJ chapel said:  “The announcement that the roles of the editors of the Yorkshire Post and Yorkshire Evening Post are to be combined is viewed with great concern by members.

“Officials of the joint chapel call on Johnston Press management to provide full details of what this move will entail and where it will lead. We want cast iron guarantees that the editorial quality of the two publications will be safeguarded.

“Under Johnston Press’s control the editorial staff of the Yorkshire Post and Yorkshire Evening Post has been subjected to repeated redundancies which have reduced the workforce by 40 per cent.

“The Yorkshire Evening Post has been reduced to two editions which are printed the night before going on sale. The Yorkshire Post also produces fewer editions. Editorial quality has inevitably suffered.

“At a time of great change within the industry, the decision to risk the loss of an experienced editor, on top of the job losses that have already occurred in the editorial department, can only be viewed with alarm.

“We hope that the wider community that these titles have served for many years will share our concern at a time when Yorkshire needs a strong and coherent voice to promote the interests of the region and those who live in it.”

Northern and Midlands organiser Chris Morley added: “The editorial teams in Johnston Press’s titles have been subjected to constant job attrition over a  number of years and our members’ ability to produce quality journalism has been severely eroded in that time.

“These latest cuts are extremely worrying, not only in the signal they give about the company’s commitment to quality and localism in its content, but also the brutal treatment to which staff are being subjected. The NUJ will not stand idly by where its members are attacked in this way.”

General secretary Michelle Stanistreet said: “These Yorkshire papers have a proud tradition of serving their community.  Forty years ago the Yorkshire Evening Post had a staff of 1,350, eight editions and a daily circulation of 230,000.

“Today there are fewer than 400 and it has two editions a day.  Further cuts and attacks on editorial is not the panacea for increased circulation.”

Yesterday’s company statement by Helen Oldham said the changes were being made “as part of the overall objective of creating a more efficient management structure.”

The company also announced that the editor of the Lancashire Evening Post, Simon Reynolds, had left the company and that eight editors’ roles in Lancashire are to be reduced to four.

10 comments

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  • April 12, 2012 at 4:43 pm
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    “General secretary Michelle Stanistreet said: “These Yorkshire papers have a proud tradition of serving their community. Forty years ago the Yorkshire Evening Post had a staff of 1,350, eight editions and a daily circulation of 230,000. “Today there are fewer than 400 and it has two editions a day. Further cuts and attacks on editorial is not the panacea for increased circulation.”

    What a silly comment. Back then there was no internet. Like it or not, things have moved on. People are reading their news online (just as we are on this website). Even if lots of cash was pumped into the YEP, it would not be able to employ 1,350 staff and publish eight editions and make a profit. The NUJ is a great union but it has to understand that digital is on a par with papers and is the future and the sooner journalists see that, the better.

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  • April 12, 2012 at 6:30 pm
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    Like it or not, the NUJ does generally stand by. Maybe not idly, because the likes of Morley are very vocal, but in the face of wave after wave of cuts, what have they actually prevented from happening. The NUJ needs to spend it’s time coming up with a real plan for the future of regional journalism based on the circumstances it finds itself in … Owned mainly by companies which are PLCs which need to make money and lots of it. Just saying ‘stop being greedy’ is pretty much standing around idly.

    The statement from the NUJ in Scotland is much more deliberate in tone than Morley’s, so there’s hope yet. Less of the soundbites, more solutions NUJ.

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  • April 13, 2012 at 11:02 am
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    Digital is here to stay, but hold on. Newspapers are still seriously propping up digital in terms of ad income. The crunch question is can digital support itself eventually. If it can’t the newspapers will have been killed off by then and a lot of people will out of work. Exciting challenge.

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  • April 13, 2012 at 2:11 pm
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    I don’t quite see the prospect of thousands of highly skilled people being made unemployed as an ‘exciting challenge’. Newspapers should look at ways of co-existing with digital on a symbiotic level, albeit with print in the smaller, subsidiary role. Digital or print, I just want good quality journalism to survive, but sadly the investment allowing journalists to produce that on either medium currently isn’t there

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  • April 13, 2012 at 2:14 pm
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    I agree with Peter Smith’s description of Stanistreet’s comment as silly and he’s right to note that there was no internet 40 years ago. However, we shouldn’t forget that sales of most regional newspapers (particularly dailies but also most weeklies) were in decline long before the internet really started to have an impact. Changes in lifestyle, increased media availability, societal changes – all were having a direct impact on newspaper sales before the internet came along.

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  • April 13, 2012 at 3:25 pm
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    The majority of journalists know that digital is the way forward and that newspapers are a slowly dying art form – but Chris is right. The big media groups need to invest rather than trying to get stressed out hacks to write papers and websites too. All that’s being delivered at the moment are thrown together newspapers and thrown together websites, just to get through the working day.

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  • April 13, 2012 at 4:02 pm
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    The digital evangelists are right up to a point but the numbers are still nowhere near stacking up. In the first half of this financial year, JP’s total digital revenues actually fell 5% to a relatively trifling £9.5m, on total income of £192m. The brutal truth is there probably is no successful business model for rapidly declining brands like the YEP and YP and that many remaining newspapers, including some big names, are simply going to cease to exist over the next five to ten years. The YEP’s circulation has almost halved since 2006 alone.
    The NUJ is puzzlingly disingenuous. Plcs exist solely to make money, whether from selling newspapers or strawberry jam – what they do doesn’t matter. If they can make more money by sacking people and taking out cost then they will, end of story. The quality of what they do actually produce is irrelevant to that calculation, unless it impinges on profits – and those profits have almost disappeared anyway so slash and burn is a last throw of the dice to satisfy the banks which are JP’s de facto owners.

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  • April 13, 2012 at 4:28 pm
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    I think the digital v papers debate is a red herring. It is all about ‘content’ now has been for years. And however you cut it you can’t produce quality content for either papers or websites without quality journalists. I remember a colleague saying years ago on our paper when JP started its staffing cuts policy in earnest ‘You wonder if the editor left if they’d even replace him!’ That was meant in jest, but we have reached the stage where apparently a newspaper can get away without having an editor. Without any impact on quality. Get real!

    Brought to you by the clowns who collapsed their own share price from £4.50 to 4p.

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  • April 16, 2012 at 10:55 am
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    Chris; exciting challenge was meant to be ironic, but I guess I messed up!
    Digital is here to stay, (it’s all senior managers talk about) and we have to give it a serious go but that doesn’t mean it is going to make shedloads of money.
    JPs serious weakness is in not recruiting enough new “shop floor “staff to do digital properly, rather than dump it on already-reduced existing staff struggling to keep papers afloat. Perhaps they can’t afford it but what’s that old saying about getting what you pay for?

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  • April 19, 2012 at 2:36 pm
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    You can make lots of money from digital – ask IBM, the world’s most powerful company. IBM and Microsoft told the media owners a decade ago that they would never make any real money from digital services while they sold them for almost nothing.

    If our stupid gaffers started charging a realistic rate they would very quickly find out who really wants a digital service. Those who aren’t prepared to pay a commercial rate can go back to buying hard copies, which is vastly more profitable for the Top 10 media groups. Simples, as the Meercats say.

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