Staff at Wolverhampton's Express & Star and the Shropshire Star are waiting to hear if there will be any compulsory redundancies at the papers, following last month's announcement that their owner was looking to cut around 70 jobs.

The deadline for a voluntary redundancy scheme launched by Midland News Association, which also publishes a number of weeklies, passed on Friday, and around 100 applications have been received from across the group.

These will now be considered by the various heads of department, with further news expected in the next couple of weeks.

It is not yet known how many editorial posts will be affected.

Express & Star managing director Alan Harris told HoldtheFrontPage: "Across the group we have received between 90 and 100 applications for the voluntary scheme and these will be considered over the next week or so.

"We've had a good cross-section of applications from most departments both at Wolverhampton and Shropshire.

"We've had applications from journalists and we will be assessing the ability and quality of these.

"We are hopeful that we can achieve the level of redundancies we are looking for through the voluntary scheme, but compulsory redundancies may be necessary in some areas."

The group says it has suffered a significant decline in advertising revenues and as result has to cut overheads.

A company statement last month said the company had previously tried to absorb the impact of reduced income in the hope that trading conditions would improve, but this had not been the case and there seemed to be no sign of things getting better in the immediate future.