Journalists at a Trinity Mirror-owned weekly have been told they will have to work from home with their office due to close in May.
The Crewe Chronicle office is being closed in what the company says is an pilot project to see whether costs can be reduced without sacrificing jobs.
Trinity Mirror has defended the move on the grounds that it is investing in “journalism, not bricks and mortar.”
But the National Union of Journalists has attacked the plan, claiming that journalists will lose the benefits that come from working as a team.
Eight staff at the Cheshire weekly are affected by the move which is due to take effect at the end of May.
According to the NUJ, the idea could be rolled out to other TM centres.
The NUJ says staff were told the move is “not primarily driven by financial reasons but as an experiment to see to see how journalists might be able to work in isolation.”
The union’s Trinity Mirror Cheshire chapel says the newspaper should retain a physical presence in the heart of the community it serves, and is concerned that its journalists will lose the benefit of the teamwork that results from working alongside colleagues in an office.
Chris Morley, Northern & Midlands organiser, said “The manner in which the company is seeking to ram through a very significant change for the way journalists work with what appears to be a veneer of consultation is shoddy.
“They are giving the impression that it is a done deal and they will accept nothing less, but our members are saying this is not good enough and want to explore alternatives properly.
“Thriving local journalism is about teamwork and not the atomisation of editorial departments that trap journalists into “news prisons” where they don’t have clear access to support, training and the buzz that comes from working in a newsroom.
“We believe this will be damaging not only for our members but crucially for the titles they support – and will be badly received by the community they serve. We want the company to demonstrate it is willing to look at all reasonable options to retain a town centre office.”
A Trinity Mirror spokesman said: “This is a pilot to evaluate how working differently, and utilising available technology can enable us to control costs without reducing the number of journalists we employ.
“We’re harnessing the benefits of mobile technology to allow reporters to work in local markets and remove costly infrastructure. We want to invest in journalism not bricks and mortar.”
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IF an individual has the facilities, there’s a lot to be said for working from home. In my freelancing years, I was able to do exactly that but it does take special commitment to be able to both shut oneself away to get on with work and also to know when to stop at a reasonable hour of the day.
Another key advantage is not having to fight your way through traffic in peak hours just to get to and from the office.
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NO! NO! NO!
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Before this goes ahead, the journos should check on a couple of things:
1. Does their mortgage provider allow their home to be used for business purposes (some don’t) ?.
2 Does this “mixed use” — ie business and residential — affect the amount of council tax they have to pay?
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Quote: The move is not primarily driven by financial reasons…*cough, cough*
When will newspaper companies stop lying to their staff? Do they think a bunch of cynical hacks buy any of this drivel?
Why not just say ‘we are in deep do do and need to save cash, so you lot get to watch Cash in the Attic while filing copy’.
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The parent company made more then £100m in profit last year and is on course to be debt free within three years.
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So non-journalist staff will lose jobs and journo staff get major upheaval because the company wants to conduct an ‘experiment’. Pathetic. At least their old chief exec still gets her £400k extra payout. Wonder how many years salary that is for the whole office?
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Only today in our newsroom we had a conversation which led to developments in a story that simply would not have been possible had we been working in different locations. United we stand, divided we fall.
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Most of our young reporters are in rented rooms in houses with housemates. Not nice des res’s in cul de sacs with own broadband, phones etc. Now they have to pay to provide companies with cars, their own phones and now office space, light, heat and power. Freelances ok. Do it myself. But these poor kids???
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I’m no longer a journalist and work from home and find the hours and arrangements very amenable. However, I know what work I have to do. I’m not sure many I could fancy this. Pretty soul-destroying, especially if you are young and want some sort of a social life around your job.
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Sorry, I must have missed something.
What happened to reporters working in their local Costa, the library or community centre?
And what comes after reporters working in their bedroom – ‘MUM! can you stop the hoovering I’m trying to talk to a berevaved mum’.
Well here’s an idea – how about media companies encouraging their staff to go self-employed – that way they can offset the use of a room, heating, bills etc against their self-assessed tax.
It’s a technique that is doing wonders for the unemployment figures.
And they could have zero hours contracts, train on the job and with a 24-7 content advice assistant only an international phone call away.
Time management systems will log the required number of stories harvested and uploaded across all platforms.
Bricks and mortar? It’s so last week!
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The mismanagement at Trinity Mirror knows absolutely no bounds. Having worked there and been privy to meetings, it’s been obvious for years that they don’t value weeklies any more. They own the prime real estate when it comes to daily papers in metropolitan areas, Liverpool, Manchester, Glasgow, and they see these readers as being more tech savvy and having more of a future.
The sad thing is that many of these weeklies do and did have money making potential and served their communities well, they were doing good journalism until they were hit with cover price increases, offices closed, photographers axed.
It’s annoying that the downward spiral of circulation is put down to ‘challenging trading’ and the rise of the internet, when in actual fact you don’t need to be Adam Smith to realise that if your product declines in quality but becomes more expensive, people will stop buying it – and rightly so.
The people at the top in this company are all out of their depth and really don’t care any more, they’re waiting for a redundancy pay off with half an eye on a good caravan they can buy, that’s why when the company tries to reposition itself digitally it’s just a case of jobs for the boys.
News editors become ‘digital content curator champions’, and this basically consists of the editor’s mate wearing an Angry Birds T-Shirt and Tweeting pictures of a ‘lovely sunset’.
If the top brass at TM really want to know why it’s business is dying on the vine, they need to look at the array of sycophantic knifemen they’ve left in charge after all the men of quality packed up their pride and left several years ago.
A disgraceful company, a disgraceful setup, shining dung and no longer even having the manners to try and call it gold.
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Well of course costs can be reduced if you close offices and have staff work “in isolation”. It may suit some older journalists who know the job inside out, but for new staff members, or those that appreciate the buzz of a newsroom, the social aspect of work, the valuable input of colleagues etc. this is a disaster. Where will it end? They’ll be asked to become freelancers before you know it.
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And who picks up the increased heating and lighting bills?
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Once again the HTFP comments trot out the usual lines. Technology has moved on people – I can conference with multiple people from my mobile phone. And as for the line that ‘poor young journalists can’t afford to be connected’, come off it. Most of them will already have top of the range handsets with unlimited contracts. If some of you lot are indicative of the industry then it’s no wonder it’s disappearing quicker than you can say “During the war…”
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Different titles have differing feels and characteristics. These may be lost as you work from your front room. Just because the technology exists doesn’t mean that it should be used to close offices. Use it as and when appropriate. For one thing, an office is advertising and branding for the title, also a meeting point between title and reader. Technology changes rapidly. I think it is wiser to embrace it as a team within an office. Working from home is not for everyone and many will feel the “isolation’.
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Ye Olde Worlde Management Commenter – Technology has moved on the world over. And yet despite it the numbers of people travelling to have face-to-face meetings has rocketed. If everyone wanted to do a conference call then offices would have been abolished in the 1980s. They don’t. People working together produces the best results. You can’t learn from each other on a bleedin’ conference call.
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Oh, let’s be honest, the horse has already bolted. There is precious little ‘buzz’ in the newsrooms I see, just sullen Jemimas and Jeremys staring at their screens in silence. Senior staff don’t have the time to offer advice to juniors. Work from home? Well, given how depressing newspaper offices are now, why not?
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Can you imagine being a trainee on your first day in the job, getting up, going to work in your front room and not having a clue where to start? The only way to learn this job is to be around others doing it. JP journalists working from home are given no extra help with heating & lighting ills. They aren’t even given a desk or chair. And now their mileage rates have been cut to 25p. This is really, really not the way forward.
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But are they investing in journalism? Probably not! I doubt there will be any more staff, any annual pay rises for staff, or better equipment.
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At least in an office you could put names to faces in most departments. Seems to me that working from home you’d become invisible. Maybe that’s the idea … nobody will miss you when you’re gone!
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Another advantage of working from home is that you’re away from a bunch of megalomaniacs trying to desperately build empires before the whole system finally collapses around them. Thanks to working from home, I’ve been able to write, edit and design whole magazines as well as books for the past 20 years. In the area I live my local paper’s office is based nearly 20 miles away – working form home might enable some journos to be closer to their patches, not further from them. I would sooner work from office at home than in an office on a depressing shut down high street or industrial estate with poor lighting and decor.
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“Ye Olde Worlde Commenter
I can conference with multiple people from my mobile phone.”
I did not know that conference was a verb. I conference, you conference, I would have conferenced, they had been conferenced.
I would love to see that verb used in an intro. Versailles today conferenced that Germany was responsible for the Great War???
Has Ye Olde Worlde Commenter ever worked as a reporter where you actually visit someone’s home to do a story on a specific topic and then spotted a photo on the wall, item on the mantlepiece, that lead to another story. Oh no, sorry Mrs Smith can you please flash your iPhone around the room to see if there is anything interesting as I am in conference with multiple people on my mobile which I love, want to marry and have babies with. Hmmmmm
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Each to their own, but the employers should at least make allowances for the extra costs involved in working from home.
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Dear “Ye Olde Worlde Commenter”,
If you are in the industry, please consider a different vocation before your naivety infects others and destroys what we have left.
If you are not, please refrain from trying to add a provocative, and no doubt witty in your mind, comment to a subject that is serious for those of us who have been in this business for more than 30 years.
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To Grey haired old hack, Kent:
“With poor lighting and decor”.
You should have added: “and no pub”.
It was in the pub that some of the best ideas in journalism were born.
Newspapers are about people. You need to be among them to know what’s going on.
Working from home sounds good in theory, but in practice it won’t work out for anything but the smallest paper.
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How many jobs have been lost? None from what I can see. I think this Is a storm in a tea cup. I worked as a sports reporter for years. I spent most of my time at the training ground, the football or cricket ground, meeting players and management and never in the office. Back then I faxed my stores in and only attended the office if I had to attend a meeting or whatever. I socialised with my colleagues and still felt part of the news and sports team. I didn’t need an office and I don’t agree that their needed. Provided the Crewe team are supported with the appropriate technology, working remotely can be liberating and I wish the guys every success.
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You could send all the sports guys home for all I care..filing a story based around whether or not a football club may or may not win at the weekend could be done by a chimp.
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