Newspapers serving Sussex and the South Coast could be subbed in Peterborough under new plans drawn up by Johnston Press.
Up to seven jobs are thought to be at risk as a result of proposals to dismantle a subbing hub set up less than two years ago.
The production unit in Horsham, Sussex, was set up in January 2011 to serve all the company’s titles in Sussex and Hampshire.
Now the work is to be transferred to another production hub in Peterborough, with staff unwilling to relocate facing the loss of their jobs.
The move was announced in a statement by Karl Dimmock, managing director of JP’s South business unit.
It comes just seven weeks before the next phase of the relaunch and redesign of all JP’s paid-for titles is due to come on stream in early September.
The statement said: “Following a detailed review of the editorial sub-editing and design production it is proposed to transfer this activity from the South Publishing Unit to Peterborough Editorial Hub.
“The proposed move will help maintain the fidelity of the designs created through the recent investment programme and will aid improvements to the newspaper titles through consistent quality controls.
“Prior to any implementation, we will consult extensively on an individual and collective basis under Transfer of Undertakings Protection of Employment Regulations 2006.
“During the consultation process we will explain the procedure, consider all alternatives, examine ways of mitigating the effects of this proposal, and address any other issues that may arise. We anticipate that this consultation process will be complete by 10 August 2012.”
Although the statement did not specify any job losses, it is understood that six sub-editing roles and one design editor’s role are at risk.
Some of those affected are already traveling long distance from their homes to Horsham following the creation of the hub there in 2011.
Titles affected by the move include Portsmouth daily The News and weekly titles the Chichester Observer, Hastings Observer, Worthing Herald, Eastbourne Herald and Crawley Observer.
All Johnston Press titles are undergoing a process of being redesigned to five templates drawn up by a group of Spanish design consultants.
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Morale now at all-time low. Good luck with the relaunches Mr Highfield.
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Let me get this straight. The firm has openly acknowledged that the relaunches are placing a greater strain on editorial staff (hence the extra day holiday entitlement everyone got rather than a pay rise) and has also acknowledged that the sub hubs are vital in making the relaunches go as smoothly as possible. So what do they do? Cut the staff in the hubs and place even more pressure on the overworked editorial teams and the remaining subs. Are they deliberately trying to sabotage their relaunches or something?
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Another day, another JP stroke of genius…
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This is a joke, right?
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Mr Highfield, if you read HTFP and the comments, staff morale is being destroyed.
Whatever the (rather shallow) staff survey said two months ago, it is now hopelessly out of date because so many more jobs have been axed and awful announcement been made since.
If you need to make changes, fine, just go ahead and do it and let people know what the plans are.
Treat them with respect and honesty rather than this constant drip-feeding of cuts. Almost every day there’s something new on here.
And giving us an effective pay cut for six months just a few weeks after all the big boys had their bonuses is another example of how shoddily treated staff feel.
Put simply, JP is a horrible place to work right now.
I think it’s even worse than it was under Fry.
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This is awful, both from the point of view of the journalists affected and what it will do to the papers concerned. But If JP is introducing just five Spanish templates, why is it running adverts for subs in Peterborough and Sheffield which state that “the successful candidate should … demonstrate the ability to generate new design ideas for our publications”?
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quote: ‘The proposed move will help maintain the fidelity of the designs created through the recent investment programme and will aid improvements to the newspaper titles through consistent quality controls’
…so, if I am to understand this correctly, the South Publishing Unit journos are incapable of following a design brief and lack the ability to judge quality, and only a move to Peterborough will miraculously grant them both…
Obviously, JP execs have been sold some potent magic beans by the Spanish…
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Agree, as usual, with everything on here – this is no way to treat your employees and it’s no way to run a booze-up in a brewery, never mind a newspaper. What it may be, though, is a way to run one daily and one weekly “local” newspaper on a national basis, like a magazine – allowing for the odd local news story to be slipped in at a distance with absolutely no regard for its importance to its home area.
I suspect that Highfield & co are no longer even thinking just about cutting costs; they are trying to change completely the model of local newspapers within their “care”. Over time there will be less & less local content in any of them as they become more advertorial magazines.
These publications, of course, will serve neither their local readerships nor, crucially, their local advertising base well, as both will discover after a while of this – but they make for a much cheaper production model, so that the profits & the bonuses can be taken until the whole thing disappears up its own a***.
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Nobody’s kidding themselves that the newspaper industry is in anything other than catastrophic decline. However, that’s absolutely no excuse for treating people like dirt.
Centralising production desks is one thing – it’s painful, horrible for anybody who loses their job and damages any newspaper’s ties with its community. It does, though, generate enough efficiencies to make it justifiable when we’re all trying to stay afloat.
What you can never justify is asking people to uproot their families once, only go to give them a swift kick in the knackers less than two years later and move them all again. That just smacks of short-term, clueless – and heartless – management. People are any company’s biggest assets, and JP are treating their staff with contempt whilst stumbling from one PR disaster to another.
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This process began as long ago as the late 1980s. I recall attending a management conference where the keynote speaker told editors that they were no longer the ‘kingpins’ of the industry.
The future, he said, was in the hands of the ad managers and sales reps – they were what he called ‘the bomber pilots’ of the industry, a term I never fully understood. But I guess he meant that the ad dept would be the hub of every newspaper, and that journalists would have to play second fiddle.
Over the years, senior executives have been drawn from this group. Inevitably, editorial priorities were jettisoned in favour of short-term profits. The speaker’s predictions were true.
Most local papers are now moving towards becoming advertorial sheets. The old campaigning ethos has gone out of the window, and they can no longer be relied upon to represent their readers on key local issues.
The endgame is clear. They’re going down the toilet fast.
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It’s misleading to say these papers will be “subbed” in Peterborough. The subbing hubs in P’boro and Sheffield currently focus solely on design – text is supposed to be right first time. It’s not like there are teams of subs poring over every word written in each centre.
When all papers are moved onto the new templates, I can’t see what ‘design’ work there will be, other than possibly a few features pages here or there.
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Look on the bright side, it’s not going to India, where JP’s ads are now designed. Soon maybe. Life is local eh? Well life may be, but JP sure isn’t.
Add this to the renewed pay freeze (only 1 pay rise in 5 years?), the lack of job security for anyone from management to journos, and you have to wonder if there’ll be much left of JP to pay off that debt mountain.
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I have never worked for a JP publication so cannot comment on the company, but I do think there is a recurring problem throughout the industry where editors are slashing staff numbers to cut the wage bill because they think this will solve their long term finance problems. Clearly this isn’t working and just maybe editors need to accept they are not business experts. It is time to think out of the box and start looking at how to move the businesses forward. Now whether this is making more use of websites alongside papers or something more, I don’t know. But it is quite clear that editors are clutching at straws and every couple of years carry out U-turns on decisions they thought would help save the business, which usually lead to further job cuts. Maybe try listening to your staff? They are the ones who talk to the public on a daily basis, so they might just have an idea of what people want
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Can’t the thought controllers at JP central head office come up with something more original than “following a detailed review” ? It smacks of corporate laziness and doesn’t exactly give the impression of any of the MD’s having any influence over the businesses that they run.
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@JCSmith
This enforced design template might boost the look of the JP titles, but an enforced design can’t give a paper its own personality. This is a good idea, but the wrong solution to the wrong question.
If you want your newspaper to sell to its catchment area then you have to ensure that it’s packed with news that relates to its catchment area.
Kelvin Mackenzie was bang on the nose when he said that he wanted every page of his Currant Bun to shock and amaze. A lot of local papers aren’t given the chance to do either.
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@JCSmith – you’re firing at the wrong people. The editors appear to be just as much victims as the rest of the editorial staff. The problems are much further up, in the ivory tower of senior management.
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@Phil Creighton – you’re bang on the money. My colleagues and I have long since been reduced to churnalists, pumping out ‘news’ at an ever increasing rate of knots, day in day out. There’s no time to properly dig into a story unless you’re happy to give up even more of your life to the company.
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Edinburgh resembles the Kremlin. One size-fits-all lunacy is not local and the new design looks watery and weak. It could have been done better in-house and saved £300,000.
Barmy idea of the century? Award must go to “must have a picture with every lead story”. Even when you have one hack having a nervous breakdown and very little copy?
JP needs new top blood who live in the real world before these clowns cost us all our jobs.
Must go; another shape has arrived and must cut story from 300 to a nib.
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Being asked for a picture with every lead story is hardly barmy….although everything else is.
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Surely they could make a film out of this company
Carry on Newspapers ……. it would be full of mishaps, disasters,
Just need to sort the characters out …
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Left JP under “voluntary” redundancy rules when sub hubs were first introduced. So sad to read all this as former colleagues are still in the saddle. Remembering back to the old EMAP days, and I think we did realise it at the time, we never had it so good.
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