A round of job cuts is in prospect at an award-winning daily newspaper in the Midlands.
The Derby Telegraph, recently honoured at the Regional Press Awards for its campaign to save rail jobs in the city, has become the latest Northcliffe-owned title in the region to feel the economic squeeze.
It has begun a consultation with around ten staff including members of the features team and the editorial artist.
However it is understood that some of the staff affected are likely to be offered to the chance of redeployment into other roles, meaning the eventual number of job losses may be signifcantly lower.
The news was announced to staff by editor Steve Hall in a statement issued yesterday afternoon.
It read: “Continuing difficult trading conditions have made it necessary for the Derby Telegraph to review its costs and, over the past few days, the company has entered into consultations with a small number of staff.
“Discussions are now taking place with some members of the editorial features team, the editorial artist, the senior management PA and, within newspaper sales, the retail sales controllers.
“We are keen to hear the views of all those directly impacted by our proposals and will not take final decisions on any potential restructuring/redundancy until these consultations have concluded. No other teams are impacted by these potential changes.”
All four Northcliffe-owned dailies have seen significant job losses this year, but the cuts in prospect at the Telegraph appear to be on a smaller scale than some of its sister titles.
Earlier this year the Leicester Mercury announced 11 editorial job losses while 14 posts were cut at The Sentinel, Stoke.
Meanwhile the Nottingham Post has seen the non-replacement of a succession of departing senior executives including the deputy editor and assistant editor.
In addition two sports desk roles were axed in March followed by the role of picture editor.
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Sad but true: to a Northcliffe head office interested in one thing and one thing only – higher returns from its beleagured centres no matter what the cost – then awards mean nothing. They allow HTFP to highlight cuts to “an award-winning newspaper” but to the men at the top this recognition of a fantastically talented editor and his amazingly hard-working team is a mere bauble. It means the main men will have to drop the Derby team a brief ‘well done’ e-mail before returning to the main business of the day – asking how efforts are going to a) reduce editorial costs to the 16% of revenue target expected of all NML centres; b) ensuring all papers have sold pages 2&3 and the back page off to the highest bidding advertiser.
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This is ludicrous. It really highlights that Northfalloffacliff don’t give a monkey about quality. Any company bothered about the quality of the title would be doing their best to preserve it somehow.
Take note wannabe award winners.. it really doesn’t matter if you bust a gut or sleep on the job, you’re numbers up anyway. So, why bother!
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Naturally, morale at Derby has been further battered by the – not unexpected – news that winning major awards and retaining a circulation proportionately a great deal better than Leicester or Nottingham means nothing to the bean counters.
But I would like to contest what seems to be a growing perception that cuts at Derby “appear to be on a smaller scale than some of its sister titles” as the story above says.
Cuts at Derby started happening a good while ago, a considerable time before the most recent and more widely-publicised cuts at Nottingham and Leicester. These “big” titles appeared to be granted some immunity from the earliest rounds of cuts, despite their poor performance.
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How about an investigation by HTFP into ‘invisible’ redundancies?
For instance, two superb and knowledgable librarians from the Nottingham office are being booted out with the archive being transferred to Derby on the Post’s move to a broom cupboard above the local bank.
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@ Hanging on – Derby hasn’t been suffering alone, every Northcliffe centre up and down the country has been taking a battering in every department including Nottingham and Leicester. Nottingham is a shadow of its former self, the only department that hadn’t taken repeated redundancies over the last three-four years was advertising production which was reduced in size by non-replacement of leavers and has now been given the final coup-de-grace by outsourcing ad setting work to India.
Like it or not, no part of the company is immune to the restructuring that is taking place. What it’ll look like in another three-four years? Anyone’s guess…
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