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Weekly in homeworking pilot offered new council base

A weekly newspaper chosen to pilot a homeworking project has been offered a new base by the local council.

Publisher Trinity Mirror announced last week that the Crewe Chronicle’s town centre office in Victoria Street would close in May, with reporters working from home.

The move has since been criticised by local councillors, and now one has offered the paper a new home at the municipal buildings.

However Trinity looks set to reject the offer, with the homeworking experiment set to be rolled out to other titles if it succeeds.

The offer of a new base was made by Cheshire East council leader Michael Jones after the issue was raised at a council meeting on Monday.

He said:  “It’s not for me to comment on a private company.  What I would say is that I’m very happy to tender an offer to the Crewe Chronicle team that if they do want to be based somewhere, we can find a place for them in the Municipal Buildings.

“We have got a radio station in there.  I’m sure we could find space for them in there.

“We need our local papers – they don’t always support me, which is fine and fair, but we need them to be vibrant and strong.”

Another councillor, Steve Hogben, said: “Crewe has lost all three of its newspaper offices, if this happens, in recent years and surely this is a backward step when Crewe is being promoted as a city.

“To me it’s extraordinary that a city shouldn’t have a newspaper office where people can drop in for whatever purpose suits them.”

However Trinity Mirror has indicated that it won’t be taking up the council’s offer.

A spokesman said: “We intend to go ahead with the pilot for a new way of working, as announced last week.”

4 comments

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  • March 27, 2014 at 10:24 am
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    Surely moving into Council accommodation would give the appearance of a lack of distance and independence – the journalistic equivalent of the legal adage that justice must not only be done, but be seen to be done? Some regional newspapers are already handicapped, by lack of reporters, from reporting on Council issues, without moving in with them literally.

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  • March 27, 2014 at 10:40 am
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    A simple query.
    Are these publishers, spokesmen, commercial media managers, digital management consultants ad infinitum, all working from home?

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  • March 27, 2014 at 1:36 pm
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    I see editors who are signing off these “mojo” initiatives keep claiming that people will see more of their local journalists out and about in the community. That’s a load of rubbish. The laptops supplied by Johnston Press need charging every two hours, meaning you spend most of your day at home using your electricity to power them. Also, wifi in local cafés and via the HTC phone hotspots simply cannot deal with the Atex system and everything else you need open at once (MediaGrid, pic archive, gmail, the internet) meaning you feel forced to go home and use your speedy internet so you can fill the many boxes that need filling by the end of the day. That, editors, is the reality – stuck at home, using my power, using my internet, certainly not getting out and about speaking to Mr and Mrs Jones face-to-face.

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  • April 2, 2014 at 8:39 pm
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    Weird that the likes of Google and Yahoo, who you would imagine know a thing or two about technology, have turned against teleworking because of the adverse affect it has on teamworking, efficiency etc etc. But, hey, what would they know about running modern web-first companies….

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