Trinity Mirror has unveiled a fresh newsroom restructure at its Midlands titles which is set to lead to 25 job losses.
The publisher has told staff it wants a flatter management structure with journalists more fully-focused on digital audience growth.
A total of 19 jobs are at risk at the group’s Birmingham centre, which publishes the Birmingham Mail, and a further six at its Coventry newsroom, which produces the Coventry Telegraph.
The changes follow the introduction of the ‘Newsroom 3.1′ blueprint last year which saw two compulsory job losses in Birmingham as part of the switch to a “digital first” publishing model.
It is understood that every member of staff at the two centres has been offered voluntary redundancy, with a deadline of 16 June for applications.
Only three weeks ago, the Mail emerged as the big winner at this year’s Regional Press Awards with two individual prizes and two team awards.
Jon Griffin, who was himself temporarily at risk of redundancy earlier this year as a result of a separate restructure, was named Business and Finance Journalist of the Year while Jeanette Oldham took the Specialist Reporter of the Year prize.
The Mail also took home the Wesbite of the Year award for its online channel www.birminghammail.co.uk and the Digital Award for its web coverage of the 40th anniversary of the Birmingham Pub Bombings.
Trinity Mirror said in a statement: “We have today announced a proposed restructure of our newsrooms in Coventry and Birmingham, to continue the progress we have already made in becoming truly digitally focussed and to help us revitalise our print products.
“These proposed changes would result in some roles being lost, from content gathering and management teams, although a number could be voluntary redundancies.
“We remain committed to daily print publishing and are maintaining our print portfolio. We will be revitalising the Birmingham Mail and Coventry Telegraph in the coming months to appeal to a wider audience.
Simon Edgley, managing director, Trinity Mirror Midlands, added: “The proposals we have shared with colleagues today are quite significant in the change in structure we need to equip ourselves as a flexible, multi-skilled newsroom of the future.
“The decision taken to implement these proposals has not been taken lightly, it is necessary for us to adapt to commercial challenges and provide a structure that gives longer term sustainability of the business.”
According to the National Union of Journalists, staff were told of the changes in a letter this afternoon.
It read: “These proposed changes are based on an evaluation of the rate of growth of our digital audiences, demand for digital content and the level of content we need for our printed editions.
“In the restructured newsroom, each and every member of the team will be fully focused on building their digital audience and therefore their contribution to our digital growth. The emphasis will be on a flatter management structure, multi-skilled teams and more agile ways of working.”
Chris Morley, Northern & Midlands Organiser, said: “There is no disguising quite how devastating and demoralising this announcement will be for journalists in Birmingham and Coventry. It is yet another big slice of the Midlands’ editorial workforce to go following a series of similar-sized cuts since 2008.
“It is particularly paradoxical to note the axe is poised over ‘content gathering’ roles. We were all told that under the digital revolution content is king. Why do you need fewer journalists to produce content for digital audiences?
“We will leave no stone unturned with management to find a better outcome and maximise the number of journalists who still retain a livelihood with Trinity Mirror in the Midlands.
“We expect the company to be ready and willing to hear the ideas and alternatives from our members as the process unfolds.”
Sign up for our free daily email bulletin
Follow HTFP on Twitter
Got a story? Email the Editor at
Big blow this and it will remove around a third of content producing staff. It’s worth pointing out that it’s a bitter pill given all targets since 3.1 have been embraced and met …. Editorial has been badly let down.
Report this comment
‘We were all told that under the digital revolution content is king. Why do you need fewer journalists to produce content for digital audiences?’
But Chris if you take away the outmoded notion of stories, articles, features, page leads, genuine breaking news, investigations and quality photos and replace it with the all-encompassing term ‘digital content’, then that can legitimately include surveys, listicles, traffic reports, lottery updates, celeb gossip and videos of kittens – and you only need a handful of monkeys to ‘gather’ it up!
Report this comment
Sadly someone must pay for Paul Gascoigne’s phone hacking compo!
Report this comment
It’s worth noting that content provided from public or other sources has the ability to be paid for. Anyone seeing their picture used or words reprinted needs to send in an invoice. The only to beat this future wave of financial burden TM is to keep your own content providers. Nothing is free.
Report this comment
What devastating news and contradictory gobbledygook from Trinity Mirror’s spokesmen.
How do you “continue the progress” they have made by slashing around a third of their editorial staff?
How do you “revitalise our print products” by getting rid of the very people who create the content that goes in them?
How do you “remain committed to daily print publishing” by making so many further redundancies?
And how do you intend “revitalising the Birmingham Mail and Coventry Telegraph” when there’ll be hardly anyone left to create and write copy?
The bottom line is to be found in the MD’s comment about adapting to “commercial challenges”.
So just more senseless cost-cutting then.
Report this comment
Three words: tip of iceberg. Scotland, Greater Manchester and Wales TM papers. Watch out
Report this comment
Trinity Mirror literally can’t do anything right. Even the redundancy offers handed to staff today were inaccurate. Complete shambles.
Report this comment
As above, phone hacking will cost them a fortune, It has cost news corp a staggering £332m so far.
http://www.pressgazette.co.uk/news-corp-hacking-scandal-costs-rise-512m
Report this comment
Laughable nonsense,…unfortunately my pension depends on these idiots.
Report this comment
I think I might take my redundancy. I’ve had about enough bull***t off the management as I can take now.
It was a difficult pill to swallow in the past, but at least you had the comfort of knowing the boss was levelling with you and genuinely hated executing the diktat from above. This time, however, it’s straight-faced and heartless.
Report this comment
With little more than three weeks to go until the halfway point of 2015 it would be enlightening if HTFP could total up editorial job losses (including photographers) for the year so far. I prophesied dire things for local newspapers here on December 31 last year but had no inkling it would get this bad. Of course, after June 30, we will still have six months to go and I’m not feeling any better. Commiserations to those being sacked here (sorry not to use any euphemisms).
Report this comment
This is all going to go very 90s .com crash, mark my words. It’s like the Credit Crunch, everyone giving loans to people until some bright spark realised they were never going to get the money back, someone soon will turn around and realise that nobody pays for anything on the internet, and nobody WANTS to pay for anything on the internet, and by then it will be too late.
I’m not saying traditional newspaper models are the future either, I suspect some kind of halfway house, with good quality – probabably weekly – periodical style magazine/newspapers would have been preferable, but the answer is definately not putting a former news editor in charge of the multimedia strategy because he’s your mate, filming things on a Nokia N96 and Tweeting pictures of snow.
Report this comment
Erm and there’s more -20 jobs lost with TM’s Media Scotland
Report this comment
So one week we’re putting out the bunting because Newsroom 3.1 has won a hat full of awards which we’re told to be very proud of as it is the future and will save us all.
This weekend I’ll be showing my very insulting letter from Simon Edgley to my husband and trying to explain why Trinity Mirror is a complete joke with a punchline that gets repeated over and over again as if the bosses think the reason they’re not getting a laugh is because the audience haven’t quite heard it properly.
I seriously think this has less to do with the Mirror’s misdemeanors, and more to do with a total lack of good management from people who understand the readership less than they do their workforce.
Report this comment
After all the job losses in recent years I’m surprised they can find another 25 people to sack. No fault of my ex colleagues but do we really want yet more awful picture spreads of readers pictures? TM management, talk to your reader’s, crap snow, rain, wind, sun pictures won’t get me back or more importantly, paying for content. You have some great staff there shame you have no idea how to make the most of them, yet another sad day for journalism in Birmingham.
Report this comment
Obviously TM are no longer interested in producing newspapers.
Perhaps the company should switch its resources to making widgets by robots! Thank God I’m retired!
Report this comment
The days of making big money from local news have gone. There is a future for local news but under a different ownership model. However, the industry remains in denial. The hope is digital will one day bring in the revenue that has vanished from print (and in the meantime it’s cut, cut, cut to keep the wolf from the door). But that day will never come. The patient’s death is going to be slow and agonising.
Report this comment
Jeff Jones is right – I believe some newspapers are doing it already, and doing it well. TM’s relentless “digital first” strategy, with a vague wave of the hand towards print (except in Reading – idiots) is a loser in the long-run. Everything bottoms out in the end. I believe that readers are beginning to realise that GOOD print products, such as those produced mostly by the genuine, old-established newspapers of the past, are more satisfying than listicles on websites and that they need them. Sadly, however, modern managements are the babes of the 70s & 80s who cut their teeth on freesheets – ad-led, where editorial was just there to fill the gaps between the ads on a ratio of sometimes 75:25. They just don’t get it, but they will. Hope I live to see it.
Report this comment
Newsroom 3.1…. How many will be left when they move to Newsroom 3.2?
Report this comment
It speaks volumes that the editor of the Birmingham Post, a P&M man to his roots, has announced that he is leaving ‘to pursue new challenges.”
After two decades of throwing money at digital and cost-cutting everywhere else, they still cannot monetise the internet. And yes, Gazza’s phone hacking compo has to be found from somewhere….
Report this comment
It’s got sod all to do with Gazza’s compo, this is just pure and utter greed by TM and some goon sitting in a finance office in London making sure his bottom line figures match what he perceives as a good profit margin. Going on the asset stripping by TM too, it won’t be long before they won’t have anything to fall back on, as the free free free culture that they push to their “readers” won’t last forever…. As someone said above we now all need to work together and make sure Jo Public know their content is worth money and to charge these greed ridden media groups……
Report this comment
This will continue to happen for as long as newspapers are read by fewer people and until digital money rises faster than it is doing at the moment. There’s no point talking about greed, because it isn’t greed by anyone at TM, it’s people doing what they have to to keep investors and shareholders happy. Nobody likes it but as long as newspapers are owned by PLCs, the priority will be a profit margin. If you want someone to blame, look at the cleverclogs who sold their newspapers to such PLCs in the 1980s and 1990s. Many of them now sit on the sidelines bemoaning what has happened to newspapers but they are the ones who started this in the first place.
A new model of ownership is required – but there’s no point being misty eyed about life in family owned businesses. They are also making big cuts, and haven’t invested in digital, which puts them in a worse position in many respects.
The NUJ has spent over a decade fighting cuts and shouting ‘greedy’ etc from the rooftops, but those who are paid by member subs now need to ask themselves what difference they are making to the future of journalism. A soundbite here and there – especially ones which manage to show how little the union understands about the business side of journalism – won’t solve anything. Exploring sustainable journalism might.
Most importantly, our thoughts should be with those who this weekend find themselves having to decide what the future holds for them.
Report this comment
I have one word – ‘depressing’.
Report this comment
Another sickening day for the poor sods left behind at BPM. Trinity Mirror seem intent on running the Mail and Post firmly into the ground – why not put your hands up, say you can’t make it work and let someone else have a go?
Some of us thought the Sly days were the grimmest, but it seems Canary Wharf always seems to find a production line of nodding dogs. How can it be that a newsroom is held up as a beacon for digital one week and systematically dismantled the next?
You’d laugh if this comedy wasn’t being played out with the lives of people working there and famous old news brands being butchered by beancounters.
And to think my former editor there told me I was crazy to want out when I left!
Report this comment