The boss of Trinity Mirror Regionals has hit out at what she called a union publicity stunt after revealing the company’s Midlands division was running at a loss.

The National Union of Journalists today announced it had passed a motion of no confidence in Trinity Mirror’s management ahead of a debate tonight about the crisis facing the region’s media.

Members of the NUJ at the Birmingham Post and Mail, Sunday Mercury and Midlands Weekly Media unanimously agreed the motion after a series of cutbacks were announced earlier this month.

The chapels have included the motion of no confidence in a letter to Trinity Mirror chief executive Sly Bailey which can be read in full at nuj.org.uk.

But TMR managing director Georgina Harvey blasted the move, saying it did nothing to address the problems facing its business in the region.

“This is yet another publicity-grabbing stunt by the NUJ which, once again, does absolutely nothing to address the commercial challenges facing our Midlands businesses and completely undermines their claims to be working constructively with us,” she said.

“A point further proved by the fact that, to date, we haven’t received a letter from the NUJ themselves and have only been made aware of its existence by the trade media.

“The NUJ’s constant claim that we are making cuts in the pursuit of short term profit is frankly laughable and insulting.

“The bottom line is the Midlands business is no longer profitable – it’s running at a loss.

“Our first priority has to be to stop the losses and reverse the trend. That will involve some hard choices; difficult decisions but necessary ones if we are to save our businesses in the Midlands.”

Trinity Mirror is currently consulting with staff over proposals to shut nine newspapers and shed 17 editorial roles while NUJ members in Birmingham and Coventry ballot for industrial action.

This latest development comes as the Birmingham Press Club prepares to host an open debate tonight about the crisis facing the print and broadcast media.

It says: “Journalists, already having recently suffered a major round of redundancies, massive structural change and being the testing ground for new, unproven IT systems, have responded to these greater workloads and longer hours, with professionalism and much good will to ensure deadlines are met and quality is maintained.

“This has been thrown back in their faces and they have been betrayed by a management with a single aim – the pursuit of short term profit through cost reduction, asset sale and redundancy.

“Under this management we fear that within a few years there will be no Birmingham Post, Mail, Mercury and weeklies.”

Comments

BPM Hack (13/07/2009 15:28:23)
This isn’t quite the full story in that it was, in fact, specifically a vote of no confidence in Georgina Harvey, managing director, regionals. People felt that her policies smacked of panic – after all when the downturn is over how do you make a profit on papers which no longer exist (eg Walsall Observer, founded in 1868, closed in 2009 by Georgina Harvey).

MarionHaste (14/07/2009 10:25:00)
The ‘Wally Obbo’ used to have such a good reputation, many of our trainees transferred from our little weekly to the WO to gain experience on what was a well-respected paper on a good, hard-news patch from which the Brum dailys and evenings were always keen to recruit.
According to HTFP, the WO has a circulation which tops 63,000.
I can see why a vote of ‘no confidence’ might be called, as it’s hard to see how an MD can have presided over such a spectacular collapse of a once proud paper with a circulation figure even now that most weeklies would kill for.