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Newsquest urged to review subbing hub system by NUJ

nujlogoRegional publisher Newsquest is being urged to review its production system amid union claims that it is fostering a “divisive atmosphere” among staff.

Newsquest reps at the National Union of Journalists claim there is  “an inherent flaw” in its production system which is causing “unnecessary pressure and conflict” between the hubs and offices across the country.

The criticism comes after the company made a U-turn on plans to transfer headline-writing from its subbing hubs, based in Newport and Weymouth, to individual local offices.

The plans were set to come into force after some editors within the group claimed to be changing “80pc or more” of headlines written at the hubs, but are now understood to have been shelved.

The Newsquest group chapel of the NUJ says it has had many complaints about the system the company created to transfer editorial production work from its publishing centres to the hubs, which has seen sub-editing staff across the country either moving to work in Newport and Weymouth or facing redundancy.

The chapel further claimed contact between staff at the hubs and their colleagues in the centres is actively discouraged by managers apart from very specific reporting lines, with claims hub staff will have to go through newsdesks to raise a query about a story, often only via email, and not talk to the reporter.

A motion passed by the chapel has now called on the company to review the system.

It reads: “This group chapel expresses deep concern at the lack of communication between regional centres and the Newport hub. This is an inherent flaw in the system established by Newsquest and calls on management to address this urgently to safeguard the quality of the products and the journalism produced. ”

Chris Morley, NUJ Newsquest group coordinator, said: “The creation of the hub system was done in a very heavy handed way by the company and it has done and continues to do little to help smooth the relationship between its staff.

“This has been extremely hard on all those who work incredibly hard with insufficient resources to try to make this work. Newsquest needs to adopt a more caring approach and ease the burden on those at the sharp end of a very difficult process.

“We are calling on the company to recognise the problems that have arisen from its operating model and work with staff to tackle significant problems in a wide-ranging review that will benefit staff but also aid productivity.”

HTFP has asked Newsquest for a comment on the issue.

24 comments

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  • January 19, 2016 at 11:45 am
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    Chis Morley is quoted thus: “The creation of the hub system was done in a very heavy handed way by the company and it has done and continues to do little to help smooth the relationship between its staff.”
    Having left the company last year I can say without doubt that Newsquest doesn’t care about its staff, so it won’t care about the relationships between staff during the current or any other hiatus. The only thing the company cares about is the bottom line. It sees its staff as resources to be used and abused, nothing more. The best thing any Newsquest employee can do is work elsewhere.

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  • January 19, 2016 at 12:00 pm
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    Here we go again, the NUJ trying to put journalists out of a job. Most of the claims in this story are complete untrue.

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  • January 19, 2016 at 12:40 pm
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    What’s untrue – seems spot on in my experience.

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  • January 19, 2016 at 1:45 pm
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    Hubs are just a fad. Something else will be along, providing the papers don’t shut down first.

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  • January 19, 2016 at 2:01 pm
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    Please can you stop writing about those of us here who are just trying to do a job. We can all read and write, we did degrees, we have trained, we have been here for 2 years, we might make mistakes but we don’t complain when our headlines get changed to ‘Local man helps charity’ or made to include rogue hyphens (happened yesterday) and generally flout the rules we have to abide by, or when the five-deck headline we managed to fill gets changed to two decks after our involvement – that would make up a lot of this phantom 80%. Thanks.

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  • January 19, 2016 at 2:47 pm
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    I’m all for communication. If some of the centres made the effort to get to know the subs, it would be a good thing. We wouldn’t have to read ill-informed comments on HTFP, for a start.
    However:
    > claims hub staff will have to go through newsdesks to raise a query about a story, often only via email, and not talk to the reporter

    The only case I know of is where a content manager insists we ring him, not the reporters. Which we ignore.

    The relationship between centres and hubs would be smoother if certain of the former shook the chips off their shoulders, stopped blaming subs for everything they perceive as wrong with Newsquest, and stopped trying (effectively) to get everyone in Newport and Weymouth thrown on the scrapheap.

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  • January 19, 2016 at 4:22 pm
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    “This (Newsquest) group chapel expresses deep concern at the lack of communication between regional centres and the Newport hub…”
    Do we take it everything is okay at Weymouth then?

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  • January 19, 2016 at 5:19 pm
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    It’s difficult to see what the NUJ hope to achieve with this. Newsquest clearly doesn’t care about employee wellbeing or the quality of the papers their hard-pressed and over-worked staff put out.

    Surely such a statement will only cause further division and bad feeling in the hubs and the regional offices.

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  • January 19, 2016 at 7:23 pm
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    I suspect the hub team is doing a good job and who, after all, defines a good headline? A popular culture play on words unlikely to be understood by 80 per cent of the readership (core audience over 60s and many, in some locations, whose first language isn’t English)?

    The writers of press releases supply headlines. If the journalists understand their stories then I cannot see an issue with them putting forward headline ideas (not a time-consuming process if the material is understood). The hub team could then decide which one best fits the space.

    If I queried the meaning of a sentence/story then my brain was apparently at fault, not my attempts to make the text understood by a wide range of people. Query whether the theft of a £8k car is newsworthy (a £70k Vogue/Sport Range Rover perhaps) and suddenly you have no general knowledge and are smirked at. At least I asked whether there should be an extra ‘1’ or even an ‘0’ there.

    I’ve noticed that there seem to be more opportunities to work from home, in an environment where you can be free from yibber-yabber about women being allowed to have babies, the return of capital punishment, etc. Sort of talk that wouldn’t be tolerated in most workplaces. Oh, ensure you give up your Newsquest job before morning sickness… And don’t let on that you’ve never been to a car sales dealership, though I did go to one when I realised that £8k could get you a decent second-hand car. Likely find a car salesman has a better code of conduct than Newsquest. From Sutton to Weymouth in a noisy old banger containing newspapers that have done lajdf;a miles… Time to call it a day? Yes.

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  • January 19, 2016 at 7:40 pm
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    I think the ‘…to clarify’ and ‘hub monkey’ are a perfect illustration of what the NUJ are saying. And, monkey, have you ever thought the 5-deck headline got changed to something else because the page content was shuffled to accommodate a change in the story content during the day? No, because you’ve never worked on a newspaper. But that’s not your fault. it’s Newsquest’s not-fit-for-purpose idea of how to produce papers.

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  • January 20, 2016 at 1:46 am
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    If anyone from the NUJ had ever actually been in this hub it might be possible to take a word of this article on how it operates seriously. Instead we get inflammatory remarks based on third-hand hear say. An organisation that claims to represent journalists doesn’t believe in verifying facts, apparently. That’s worrying. Even more alarming is this seeming intent to destroy journalism jobs at a time when the industry is on its knees and those in the trade are already moving around the UK to follow the remaining slivers of work.

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  • January 20, 2016 at 9:19 am
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    Arthur, I realise there are valid reasons for changes, but that perfectly valid reason for a change would contribute to the ‘headline changed’ figure used to beat us with lately. There are mistakes on both ends, but everyone (bar one) I’ve ever spoken to on the phone (YES we are allowed to communicate – can you believe it?) has been lovely at best or at worst very polite and working towards the same goal. Having our name dragged through the mud on this website (four times now in the last few weeks) just feels tiresome. There seems to be an assumption that the hubs are filled with illiterates and that every story comes to us with perfect English and goes back a load of nonsense, and it’s just not true.

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  • January 20, 2016 at 11:16 am
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    patrickdedwards: “Most of the claims in this story are complete untrue.” Looks like you need a sub-editor. But, apart from that, a little more detail is required if you are to be believed. Which claims are untrue and which are true?

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  • January 20, 2016 at 1:49 pm
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    Whilst it is encouraging the hub staff are improving, the thrust of the argument is that hubs per se and the Newsquest ones in particular, are not as good as subbing at local centres.
    The acid test is Newsquest brought these hubs into existence: to save money. No one can credibly claim any Newsquest title that has gone over to the hub has improved.
    But that is not a direct attack on the hub staff. Most would accept that like all of us they have a pride in their work and they will be absolutely doing their best. The problem lies above them and the false promises and claims that were made around what a centralised set-up would achieve.
    People in the centres are not criticising the hubs because they don’t like change or some wish to put the people in Newport and Weymouth out of a job. What they resent is that they’re being forced to work harder to produce a lesser product because of cost-cutting. They’ve seen 80 per cent of their production resources cut for about 30 per cent of the work to be done in the hubs. And still the cuts and redundancies continue.
    The legendary claim of 80 per cent of headlines being changed is no doubt less now but in the early days for main headlines my experience was it was not too far off. As well as an improvement in what is coming out of the hubs, the number of changes lessening is likely to be down to the staff in the centres thinking: If the company has no pride left in my newspaper, why should I flog myself?
    I struggle to see the NUJ achieving anything but one of the points it is raising is how divisive this is. And on that point, some hub staff don’t like being criticised but are happy to slate the quality of work from their colleagues in the centres. One of the reasons the copy might be so poor is because those in the centres have got so much to do now they don’t have the time to produce what they once did.
    Not their fault, just as the overall failings of the hub is not the fault of the rank-and-file staff there.

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  • January 20, 2016 at 3:01 pm
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    >Arthur17
    I think the ‘…to clarify’ and ‘hub monkey’ are a perfect illustration of what the NUJ are saying.

    What we are saying, Arthur, is that we’ve had two years of being battered in the comments section on this website. It’s hard to keep taking that without answering back in kind.
    We’ve always been open to working with the centres. Still are.

    And believe it or not, we have good relationships across the country with a good number of content managers.
    As a general FYI, Newport has been a (regional) ‘subbing hub’ since the 1990s.

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  • January 20, 2016 at 3:18 pm
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    I think people in the hubs replying back with complaints ourselves is mainly as a retort to constantly being attacked online with criticism, and is not an attack on the centres themselves either – really it’s just telling you, the HTFP judges/jury, the realities of things from our side. No-one here has a problem with those on the ‘other side’, it’s all very pleasant actually and we’re all trying to do a good job, but with these continual attacks eventually you feel like standing up for yourself – that’s the only reason I commented. I think these comments online do more to breed a divide than anything else.

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  • January 20, 2016 at 5:01 pm
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    Can I lay to rest the belief that Newport is a ‘sweat shop’. I came to South Wales from the heavily unionised Lancashire Telegraph in Blackburn and I’ve found the staff friendlier and the workload fine. Hours and lunch breaks are set in stone and, as far as I can see, no one is sweating.

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  • January 20, 2016 at 7:07 pm
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    I’m glad that the hubs are no longer sweat shops Nick Wood and that you have breaks and lunches Sadly what Newsquest has left behind in the local centres are mainly junior reporters, because they have got rid of many senior staff, who have to work in sweat shop conditions, no breaks or lunches more hours with no leadership. All Newsquest is creating is a platform for PR companies rather than real journalists doing their proper job. One editor raised this with their superior who was confident the papers would get out. The editor said: ‘I’m sure they will. I’m talking about these reporters as human beings.’ There was no answer. Sums Newsquest up.

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  • January 21, 2016 at 9:36 am
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    That’s the real problem, Sarah. Newsquest doesn’t care. Staff run into the ground with exhaustion? Tough, they should count themselves lucky to have a job. What’s important is the shareholders’ dividends and the MD’s flash company car.

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  • January 21, 2016 at 9:53 am
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    Sarah, you seem to be very bitter about the hubs. I’d hazard a guess you are news editor at a Home Counties title acquired by Newsquest last year, and the editor you are referring to is your former boss who left last year. Unfortunately Sarah, the newspaper industry is losing a lot of money and evolving in a way to save money, so long established systems of bringing out newspapers are changing. If people don’t like the way it’s going they can leave. I don’t think Newsquest is different from any other big company in so much that profit comes first. If you ran a company and could save hundreds of thousands of pounds by streamlining your staff and getting remaining people to do more and bringing in cheaper methods, wouldn’t you do it too? Sadly there isn’t room for emotion in big business, and Newsquest is very big business.

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  • January 21, 2016 at 10:27 am
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    The hostility that there is seems to be almost entirely one way – from the regions towards the hubs. I’ve been sworn at twice on the phone – once because I had the temerity to suggest that we might be able to get more of their newspaper’s work done if they got off the phone. And another time I was threatened with a disciplinary after a ‘robust’ phone call – until I sent them an email trail that proved the point that I was making.

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  • January 21, 2016 at 1:36 pm
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    Tubbs, Newsquest remains very profitable to the point where it upped the directors’ remuneration last year. I’m not arguing the big bosses shouldn’t get the biggest pay packets but it demonstrates the company is hardly about to go broke. And that’s an interesting concept on ‘big business’, unless big business equals continually making staff redundant (including digital staff), driving some of your remaining best out of the door, cutting the quality of your products, overseeing falling sales, overloading your remaining staff, implementing a production system that doesn’t work properly with your own digital system, and having workloads that means the quality of your digital output – the future – is going backwards. Big business moves forward, it doesn’t just cling to revisiting costs and then cutting. What it’s done to my local paper, the Reading Chronicle, within six months of ownership is reduce it to its lowest point in a 190-year history. There’s nothing to be proud of over that.

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  • January 21, 2016 at 4:40 pm
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    One former advertising director once told be he tolerated editorial because they were the reason why people look at a paper. With falling standards and the exceedingly overworked staff, doing double the work that even Newsquest says it should do, is not going to get a newspaper in front of the customers or entice advertisers to purchase with falling numbers. I’m not bitter I’m very sad that a product that the staff had pridein, that was profitable and was trying to proper reporting (not just retyping press releases) is being quickly destroyed. Evidence of that is maybe asking how many senior people have resigned since they took over papers. And Tubbs I don’t believe in hiding behind pen names – we’re journalists asking people to talk to us all the time – if I have something to say I will!

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  • January 27, 2016 at 4:34 pm
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    I’m surprised that, in Newsquest’s world, “robust phone call” led to the threat of a disciplinary and not out with no pay.

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