A newspaper group which has previously claimed not to have made a single journalist redundant since the start of the recession is considering job cuts at one of its flagship titles.
Journalists at Sir Ray Tindle’s South London Press were invited to apply for voluntary redundancy last Thursday.
However the company is continuing to insist it has no plans to make any journalists compulsorily redundant, and claims the initial request for a voluntary redundancy scheme actually came from a member of staff.
In a statement issued this afternoon, Tindle vice-chairman Brian Doel said the offer had been prompted by individual members of the editorial staff asking if there was an option for voluntary redundancies and the company had agreed to the request.
The Streatham-based SLP has an editorial staff of around 20. A policy of non-replacement of staff has been in place on the title for some time,with one insider telling HTFP that no staff journalist has been replaced in the past three years.
A similar policy which had been in place at Tindle’s Enfield-based North London and Herts Newspapers division last year resulted in strike action.
A press release issued by the Tindle Group at the start of the stoppage on 18 April 2011 stated: “Tindle Newspapers has been proud to say that our entire group had come through all three years of this recession to April 2011 without making a single member of our many editorial departments redundant.
“We think we are the only newspaper group to have that record while thousands have lost their jobs in the newspaper industry as a whole.”
The claim was also made by chairman Sir Ray Tindle in a letter to Chingford Times managing director Scott Wood congratulating him on the launch of that title last June.
Sir Ray wrote: “Tindle Newspapers is proud that we have so far survived three and a half years of the worst downturn in living memory without making a single journalist redundant.”
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This is terrible news – the SLP is a brilliant paper. I am surprised to hear there are just 20 editorial staff left – 12 years ago there were about 15 reporters just working on the SLP, not to mention the staff on the Mercury titles. There were thriving sports, picture and entertainment desks and a big team of subs. As with all newspapers the SLP has been forced to make savings, but there are so few people putting the titles together that I fail to see how they can manage to survive. I fear the newspaper industry is on its last legs – which is desperately sad, especially for a title like the SLP which in the past has regularly beaten the nationals to some of the nation’s biggest stories…
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Just to set the record straight:
1) The arts editor at North London and Herts was made redundant on 29th October 2011. Does he not count as a journalist?
2) “A similar policy which had been in place at Tindle’s Enfield-based North London and Herts Newspapers division last year resulted in strike action.” As far as I recall, the “Enfield Nine” were only threatened with possible redundancies the evening before they went on strike and I am sure they would happy to furnish HTFP with the letter that was issued to confirm this.
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‘Similar policy’ refers to the non-replacement policy.
Having said that, I know of a Tindle reporter who was made redundant four years ago. He obviously doesn’t count either.
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I know a bit about the situation in that newsroom and it has been dire there for weeks. Months, really. People are so demotivated at the whole thing and the quality of the paper has suffered immeasurably. There’s not been a new reporter recruited for three years. Staff leave and are not replaced, ever. It means you end up with a very top-heavy staff team because people don’t leave in equal numbers from each area of editorial. There are a decent number of subs, but v few reporters. Instead of accepting the future is in the web, the management at Tindle have ignored it and hoped it will go away and the paper will carry on making money like in the good old days. What they have failed to realise is people take one look at our shoddy website and think to themselves ‘why should i buy the paper when the website looks this bad and outdated?’.
I think quite a few of the staff there will take the money and run. RIP SLP within a year, I’d imagine.
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This is very sad news and I wish the staff the best. The South London Press was not so long ago one of the best weeklies in the country, but it is dying now because Tindle can’t accept he’s an old man who knows nothing about the internet.
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A letter the South London Press didn’t print after the rioting/looting last year:
“The South London Press is a paid-for newspaper whose proprietors favour this type of publication and, indeed, have been launching paid-for papers in other parts of London even during the current recession.
The group is reluctant to give away very much content free of charge, and this is reflected in its competing free papers locally and in the SLP website, which generally points users to buying the publication (either as a paper copy or online as an e-edition) to get the full story. This model may work very well for weekly or bi-weekly papers in normal circumstances, but the recent incidents of looting and rioting were not (we hope) normal circumstances.
This week, with rapidly-rolling news and a great deal of speculation and rumour flying around, it would have been right for the SLP (as an established source for local information) to have published on its website more of the news its reporters were no doubt working hard to gather.
The SLP’s failure to do this risks undermining the value people place on it as a major source of local news and information, forcing them to look elsewhere for news, and ultimately undermining the paper’s business model and its very survival”.
I stand by that, but “Anon” and “ITK” need to be able show how in general putting more news on the website would be a better business model; a lot of papers around the country seem to be struggling having put (almost) everything online and then finding circulation falls, and revenue with it.
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TIm Barnsley makes a good point re viability of web. The truth is that is a huge risk concentrating on web instead of newspapers because no-one on local papers knows if enough money can be made. Am not saying we shouldn’t try-we should- but it is possible webs will never make really good money. And newspaper staffs will be so slashed by the time they found out that………
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ITK – have you looked at this piece?:
http://htfpnew.adaptive.co.uk/2012/news/dyson-at-large-back-to-the-future-with-broadsheet-weekly/
Another old, if you want to call 91 old, man running a newspaper and without much of a web presence. Those two papers don’t seem to be doing badly at getting people to buy the paper or advertise in it: 70 jobs alone in the latest issue
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Tim, that broadsheet is a beauty.
I don’t want to carp, but I wonder – how much competition does the Lymington Times face?
It makes sense to keep your copy back for the paper if you’re the only one to be carrying it, but in a city, where radio, the BBC, dailies (both print and online), skilled bloggers and the like are publishing everything as soon as it happens – what then?
All these outlets are using the same court copy, reading the same council reports, receiving the same police bulletins, watching the same Twitter feeds – there’s only limited exclusive copy kicking about (as with the nationals)
Not to belittle the Lymington Times in any shape or form, it sounds like it’s doing a wonderful job, but surely the market and therefore business model is different if you’re the only player in town.
Having said that, if Lymington is awash with competition, I take it all back
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I don’t know Lymington, but there is an evening paper in the area and local radio stations. Arguably, local radio outside London can provide more competition to papers than does “local” radio in London.
I don’t think everything in a local paper has to be up-to-the-minute, and it doesn’t have to be all exclusive. In my earlier post about the riots, I said that there was a time when my local paper should have been putting more news more quickly on to its website; whether it does so at other times is for it to decide. The Lymington paper certainly seems to pull everything together in one place – news and local ads – and that looks good to me. The urgency of the rolling news agenda is often spurious; to have a calm, chunky read about my local area once a week would be good, but we don’t have that.
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