The owners of the Wolverhampton Express & Star and Shropshire Star are to close the final salary pension scheme to staff at the papers from July 31.
The Claverley Group had proposed to introduce a defined contribution scheme from June 1, but has told staff this has been put back to allow more time for consultation.
All pension scheme members at the two titles and their sister weeklies have received a letter detailing how they will be affected individually.
Group chief executive Graham Evers had cited “the continuing increase in both costs and unlimited risks facing UK pension funds” as the reason behind the move.

Online news and information will supplant television network news as the leading news source over the next five years, but newspapers will remain a vital source on their own, and can become dominant if they successfully integrate online delivery as a part of what they offer the public.
That’s the finding of a Harris Poll conducted last month by Harris Interactive in conjunction with the Innovation International Media Consulting Group and presented Wednesday at the annual congress of the World Association of Newspapers and the World Editors Forum in Cape Town, South Africa. The poll results were announced in conjunction with publication of Innovation’s 2007 report, “Innovations in Newspapers”.

The World Association of Newspapers has called on democratic governments to take specific measures to protect freedom of the press in the face of widespread tightening of anti-terrorism measures.
A resolution issued during the World Newspaper Congress and World Editors Forum in Cape Town, said: “WAN believes that though balancing the sometimes conflicting interests of security and freedom might be difficult, democracies have an absolute responsibility to use a rigorous set of standards to judge whether curbs on freedom can be justified by security concerns.”

Young people see traditional media as more accurate, trustworthy and reliable than new media, but many get most of their news and information from another source entirely – family and friends, according to research for the World Association of Newspapers.
The goal of the research was to have young people from around the world confirm or challenge hypotheses regarding their media usage habits and attitudes. The insights will be used to guide the next phase of Youth Media DNA, a quantitative study in which 1,000 youths between 15 and 29 years-old will be surveyed in every country that participates in the study.

Two innovative journalism degrees at the University of Wolverhampton have become the first of their kind in the country to receive top accreditation.
The Foundation Degree in Broadcast Journalism and the BA (Hons) Broadcasting and Journalism top-up degree have both received Accreditation Pending status from the Broadcast Journalism Training Council.

Employees at Archant have received a total of around £650,000 in shares in the company as a result of a recent share incentive plan offer.
On June 1, staff received around 57,000 shares between them, most of which were free. Around 1,300 employees have bought 7,300 partnership shares. Each of these shares was then matched for free by Archant awarding two further matching shares.