A newspaper group that recently shed around 20 jobs in a restructure has launched a recruitment drive to fill a raft of new positions.
The CN Group announced proposals last month to reduce operating costs by around £600,000 with a number of sub-editing, photographic and management positions under threat.
There has since been a net reduction of around 20 roles, mostly as a result of voluntary redundancy.
However the family-owned company has now launched a drive for fresh talent, with a number of newly-created roles coming on stream along with some which remained unfilled during the restructure process.
The changes have led to creation of a new central team designed to deliver content across three key areas; business and finance, entertainments and commercial content.
Meanwhile, a new position of digital content producer has been created as part of a refreshed digital content strategy.
A proposal to create a centrally-managed production hub to handle content across the group will be rolled out next month.
And at the same time, staff across the group’s West Cumbria titles – the Times & Star, Whitehaven News and the West edition of the News & Star – will be merged into a single team.
Group editorial director David Helliwell, pictured, said: “This has been a tough period for all our staff and I’m grateful for the professional manner in which everyone has handled it.
“We’ve a host of changes to our operation that we now need to work through and I’m pleased to say that as part of that we have a number of editorial vacancies available.”
Roles that were left unfilled during the restructure process include a news reporter post at the North West Evening Mail and sports reporter roles at Carlisle, Barrow, and Workington/Whitehaven.
All the new jobs are now being advertised on HoldthefrontPage until 4 April. Click on the links below to find out more.
Sign up for our free daily email bulletin
Follow HTFP on Twitter
Got a story? Email the Editor at
‘to fill a raft of new positions’
What’s with the widespread use of the word ‘raft’ in today’s journalism – raft of measures, raft of ideas?
Here someone might think it is being used in its regular connotation as a means of escaping a sinking ship or desert island.
And don’t get me started on ‘lockdown’!
Report this comment
All these years I have been “delivering content” and I never realised it. Just sign here, please, and enjoy it.
Report this comment
‘Coming on stream’? Oh dear…
Report this comment
This is all another sign that the cost cutting ethos that is destroying the rest of the regional newspaper industry has finally penetrated CN group – along with a new chief exec (from suit central) who dumps the unpalatable job of commenting on “exciting futures” on the ed-in-chief, unlike Robin Burgess, who held his own hands up. At least, until/unless the company is being fattened up for sale (god forbid), subbing can’t be outsourced to Newport or Sunderland!
Report this comment
I could never work out when people stopped being sent to prison and suddenly were caged.
Report this comment
Point of information, Well over 30 volunteers (34 I think) plus around five compulsory redundancies.
Report this comment
Sadly, I can assure GladImOutOfIt that there will be no: “subbing outsourced to Sunderland”, as he suggests in an earlier post.
I count myself privileged to have witnessed the last days of the great stirring herds of Wearside wordsmiths that once roamed in Sunderland’s spacious editorial surroundings, strolling from computers to canteen; from coffee machine to car park with an imperious confidence, a wintry dignity a well-earned but usually under-stated arrogance borne of generations of backroom service dutifully supplied.
Memories of an era when they gathered purposefully at a subs desk which stretched as far as a rheumy hack’s eye could see, still have the capacity to bring a tear to my own.
But those days are long gone, those magnificent beasts shot down, many in their prime, by JP’s head-count hunters, aided and abetted by smiling assassins in Human Resources.
Few of their species were spared as the hatchet men and women came, taking young and old alike without thought to the future; only the bottom line.
In recent days, even the subs that survived the Great Extermination have quietly moved from the endangered list, to the point of extinction as the far-from-grim reapers are seen once more striding the editorial culling fields.
The handful rumoured to remain are shy, suspicious creatures rarely to be glimpsed poking their heads above the foliage of a computer screen, lest they too be mown down.
So, no GladImOutOfIt – no outsourcing to Sunderland, or, as it is probably known now, in a near post sub-editorial world, SNunderlang.
They simply don’t have the staff.
These things be true, for I have seen them with mine own eyes.
Report this comment
raft. ongoing.upcoming. bin them all! better expressions and words available. (continuing for ongoing, nothing for upcoming as you don’t need it.)
Report this comment
Pedant: the worst of all is “following” when you mean, simply, “after”. So much copy is infested with it now – and it’s plain wrong. The other one is the tautology so beloved of BBC weather forecasters “and also”. And let’s tip a hat to the abysmal “currently”, which the present tense of all known verbs implicitly contains. So, following CN Group’s restructure let’s hope the currently ongoing recruitment campaign delivers top-notch staff and also a better future to come.
Report this comment
Raft?
Sadly many journalists are like chimpanzees and happily trot out these nonsense words;
Report this comment
I’d like to reach out to all those guys complaining about cliches in copy…
Report this comment