Nine photographers are set to be made redundant at a trio of Newsquest-owned dailies across the North of England.
Photographic staff at the Bradford Telegraph & Argus, Northern Echo and The Press, York, have been informed of the plans, due to come into force next month.
Four jobs are set to be lost at the Echo’s Darlington base, with the same number departing from York and Bradford.
At each title a new position of picture co-ordinator will be created at each newspaper, with one of those made redundant likely to be offered the role.
It is understood those who leave the company will be given top priority to carry out freelance work on its behalf, while more reliance will be place on reporters taking photographs and reader submitted pictures.
A consultation period is now taking place with affected staff, with the plans due to be enforced from 1 October.
The latest cull follows a similar move at Newsquest titles in the region in December, which saw Echo chief photographer Richard Doughty and his deputy Andy Lamb leave as part of a review across the company’s North East and Yorkshire titles.
The same review also saw photographers at weekly sister titles the Keighley News and Craven Herald, Bob Smith and Steve Garnett, made redundant.
The Press also axed the role of picture editor and reduced the number of staff photographers.
A statement from the National Union of Journalists chapel in Darlington said: “The latest redundancies mean the centre will have lost six out of seven photographers in less than a year, leaving only one photographer in place in a newly-created ‘co-ordinator’ role.
“It is a further blow to the editorial department, which is already reeling from the consequences of staff cuts during the year. It will have severe implications for the publications with regard to the quality of its photographic coverage.”
The move is the latest in a series of photographic cutbacks at other Newsquest papers in recent months, with the group reducing the number of staff photographers and increasing the use of freelances.
In February, it was announced that two picture desk roles would be axed at the Southern Daily Echo to be replaced by a user generated content editor role.
Photographic staff at Newsquest’s North London titles were reduced from six to three last year, while job cuts at the Worcester News and its sister weeklies saw four photographer jobs, one full-time and three part-time, reduced to one full time equivalent.
Newsquest has declined to comment.
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Not to mention the loss of photographers at the Swindon/Wiltshire titles too… it’s as if great pictures aren’t a selling point.
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The heavy machine-guns are opening up again now that the summer holidays are over. All local press staff, bar senior suits, are in the firing line and I wonder who’ll be left standing when Christmas comes around. I doubt if it will be all over by then but that day is surely coming fast for the big national owners of our papers/websites. Good luck to everyone affected by this and I hope you all get new jobs quickly.
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In a digital age where image and film rule, it boggles the mind that newspapers think they can rely on reader generated pics.
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It is understood those who leave the company will be given top priority to carry out freelance work on its behalf,
How kind
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Newsquest is clearly stripping away its support for quality, professional staff photography. This leaves this business reliant on the public or submitted pictures from vested interests or freelance photographers, often those it has made redundant.
“The NUJ has warned this is detrimental to the journalism being produced as independence of content creation is compromised. Reporters cannot and will not take up the slack as they do not have the time and have not had the training or support or equipment. This represents Newsquest completing the first part of making news an amateur pursuit.
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Having made all of their staff redundant, who have the executive level ‘solutions’ brigade got left to manage? I honestly believe Caligula would make for a better manager than most of these faceless suits.
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I left reporting because I became tied to the desk and couldn’t get out and about and meet people due to cutbacks.
Interviews were only done over the phone.
How are the reporters going to be able to take photos when they are barred from leaving the office?
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Photographers need reporters to make a stand. It will help us and save reporters from the massive amount of extra work that they will have to cope with. The quality pictures used in these titles will also be maintained!
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It is truly unbelievable that there are people running the company that don’t understand how important imagery is, either in print or online. A good photograph online or a gallery will get more hits than any story. Yes people are used to looking at blurry photos taken on phones on social media and yes anyone can take a photo nowadays, but it doesn’t compare to images taken on a high spec SLR camera by a professional photographer. How many business websites have images that have not been taken by a pro? They use good imagery to attract business, not c**p images to distract!
I know they will use the snappers made redundant as much as they can, but they may find they are too busy working for other people and businesses which still appreciate a good image.
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How long before the ancient and respected trade of the honourable company of ‘Picture Co-ordinators’ will be consigned to the scrapheap of history?
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Local newspapers really have become an absolute joke. Getting rid of photographers – who would have thought this a few years ago? As for this ‘user generated content’ claptrap – where people produce material, send it in, then pay for the privilege of seeing it – I remember when that was called ‘vanity publishing’! Local newspapers used to be a real source of solid local news but now they no longer have the resources to produce the quality product they once did. Neither have they the respect from the communities they serve. No dedicated photographers, reporters that are out of touch with their communities and websites that are choked with pop-up advertising. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry when I saw JP’s Ashley Highfield claiming yesterday that it was all the BBC’s fault. Well, he would say that, wouldn’t he?
Really sorry for the snappers losing their jobs at the Northern Echo and the other papers, but at least they are going while there are funds left to pay their redundancies. Local newspapers are spiralling into oblivion, that’s plain to see. It’s just a simple matter of time now, but I suspect the end will be coming sooner rather than later.
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I’m assuming this will leave one or two staff photographers behind at each title?
Imagine the pressure they’ll face.
When Newsquest issued those nice new phones, this was clearly on the agenda….
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Having gone through this process last year all I can say is don’t bank on the freelance work, proved to be a joke from both a money and working conditions point of view, I think it was £70 per eight hour shift including all expenses. Was glad I had other options and didn’t have to accept the paltry sums on offer. I feel sorry for anyone in this situation as it is horrible but all I can say looking back is the threat of redundancy over a four to five year period was worse than when it actually happened and over twelve months later i’m glad I got out of a dying (dead?) industry which was unrecognisable from when I first started.
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Every time reporters take a PIC or shoot a video they do one of their snapper colleagues out of a job. Think about it scribblers as you process another blurry, poorly lit, out of focus sent in PIC too!
The pix in my weekly make me squirm. Some of the submitted sports pix are laughable, but still used. Anyone heard of depth of field? Thought not!
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This sounds like a great idea! You axe the snappers (although you do keep one of your talented photographic staff but only so they can sit at a desk “co-ordinating” all those blurry badly cropped pictures people are sending in) at the same time as you are trying to charge people to view your, ahem, quality work online!
“Yes I’d love to pay you so I can see the picture I sent you on your website, thanks very much!”
And can you imagine having to be the reporter who says to lovely Mrs Moggins “oh I am sorry Mrs Moggins, we would love to cover the 100th anniversary of your WI branch but can you take the picture for us and send it in please?”
I’m sure that will go down well with the communities the paper is supposed to serve.
Next step will be to axe reporters and just ask people to send copy in as well!
What a farce.
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With every passing week there seems to be less and less incentive to buy a regional newspaper.
Not many people would consciously put the publication of professionally taken photographs at the top of the list of reasons to buy a regional newspaper, but you miss them when they are gone.
The drip,drip drip to oblvion rolls remorselessly on.
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Newsquest is behind the curve with all this stuff. I worked at Trinity and then moved to Newsquest and was amazed they still had people like picture desk assistants. Any TM executive in a Newsquest paper would have been like a kid in a sweet shop wondering who they could get rid of next. We even had a librarian, a librarian! Absolute scenes. Welcome to 2015 Newsquest – the revolution will not be televised, it will, however, be available on pay per view.
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I was astonished to read Peter Barron’s leader page comment in today’s Echo. Speaking of the migration issue, he starts by highlighting the power of photographs. It’s beyond irony.
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A shortsighted move by a management that has no vision. Quality, still images are more important, for a successful publication today, then they have ever been. We live in an increasingly visually literate society that will not buy into amateurish, low quality ‘photography’.
Not to mention that the very staff, being thrown out with the bath water, are the public face and ambassadors of the journals and websites they represent.
The end really is nigh!
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A fully trained press photographer is priceless, especially the photographers at these titles. So I’ve got one phrase for all the suits at Newsquest et al ….. “A picture is worth a thousand words” – Newquest hang your heads in shame!
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Brilliant local pictures are one way that newspapers can shine online – and be better than their competitors – in the digital age. Investment in staff is key to any success. Reducing quality will result in fewer readers. It’s that simple.
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And so it goes on. By all means hang on for your redundancy cheque. Then leave. Don’t go freelance. You’ll starve. Don’t go into PR. That’s for saddoes who couldn’t think of anything better to do after journalism. Or those who are too gutless to retrain in something different. But leave newspapers you will, whether you want to or not. But be bold and brave and make your mark outside the industry. It doesn’t deserve you and you deserve much, much, more than you’re getting. Good luck.
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The power of the photograph is no more recognized than in the papers this week. Photography is an art and can portray more emotions than thousands of words cant say. Someone upstairs at Newsquest obviously sees photographers as a unnecessary cost and believe it is better to go down the getting photos from the public line.
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Picture co-ordinators? It would be funny if it wasn’t scandalous
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I remember my editor – keen to impress the Trinity management – telling me not use freelance photographers to take pics for our annual school proms pull-out. It was, she said, a great example of how we could use user-generated content by asking the pupils, parents and staff to send in their own photos. The result? A handful of poor quality pictures, the majority featuring the same group of girls!
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Having left Newsquest earlier this year it is sad to see national management still deciding this is the way forward. They are stripping out the heart of their newsrooms yet other departments, like advertising, remain full or even overloaded. It is so short-sighted. We were ahead of the curve when Newsquest went web first and embraced online news. Sadly, the advertising departments remained focused purely on ad sales in newspapers which is why the company cannot seem to make enough money from its digital operation despite its impressive web stats. Losing key editorial heads and merging newsdesks is not the answer – re-training ad reps and changing their priorities is. Sadly, because most regional managing directors are former advertising managers, this department will not and did change its culture and it was too late to do so when the cull came. Without that culture change the company will not produce the revenue it wants from the digital operation. On the one hand you have brilliant online news coverage and great newspapers produced by a minimal number people while next door you have an advertising team dressed up as Santa Claus in September selling Christmas ads for the newspaper eating 100 pizzas purchased by the company. One department is smooth and efficient, the other stuck in the 90s. Yet, Newsquest seems to believe the only way to resolve this is to merge newsdesks, cut editors, news editors, web editors, photographers and reporters and centralise subs. Whoever came up with this business plan must now be able to see it will not work. Why not just change the culture in another department?
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And this in the week when an image of a drowned toddler being carried from a beach. shot by a news photographer, impacted around the world.
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There are many valid and well made points in this thread of comments. Not least the matter of image quality. Professional newspaper photography is a skill. It entails having a great news sense, a creative eye for composition and light, technical ability both in using the camera equipment and transmission equipment, anticipation and the reading of a news event, experience in working and communicating with people, loyalty and dedication. All of this adds up to experience and cannot be replaced by amatuers with mobile phone cameras.
In addition to the above points the management of the newspaper groups are being very short sighted as to the longer term effects of not owning any material it publishes. Images from a major landark event on its “patch” will not be owned by a newspaper and this may impact on rights and reproduction costs in future years. If word ever gets out to Joe public that they own the copyright to any image they take and as such can ask for and should receive a reproduction fee then this whole business strategy will come tumbling down.
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Brighton Argus -12% – I rest my case
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While agreeing with all the comments above, I feel I have to take issue with Ex-Hack when he describes people in PR as “saddoes who couldn’t think of anything better to do after journalism” or “too gutless to retrain in something different”.
Nothing could be further from the truth!
Having spent nearly 40 years in regional newspapers I went freelance several years ago following redundancy and am happy to say I’m still working as a journalist, but now in PR.
Much of what I do is in the charity sector and I find it extremely rewarding, more so than when I still worked for a regional newspaper.
So, why would I want to do anything other than still work in a profession I have also loved and continue to do so?
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RIP = DIY!
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Absolute guarantee that this will impact on the circulations of the titles impacted on with revenue losses greater than the saving from making these poor souls redundant. The commitment to using them as freelancers isn’t worth the paper it’s written on, in fact, it won’t be written anywhere, other than in this article.
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Isn’t this just another example of Newsquest watching Trinity Mirror destroy the regional press with mindless cut backs, waiting to see how they do it, then use their model as a template.
If you work for Newsquest and want to know what your future holds, just look at us in Trinity Mirror La La Land.
We’re like an evil crystal ball!
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They are all at it and it will spell the end of local newspapers. As many have already said who is going to pay to see their own blurry images in print? Also what about the othere readers? are they going to continue paying for a sub-standard product full of phone photos..they can already get that for free…IT’S CALLED FACEBOOK!!!!!!!!
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The number of replies garnered over a subject proves that people like us still actually care. Trouble is most of those in charge don’t and are already plotting the route to their next fat pay cheque and generous expense account.
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Former TM Regional Journo
I agree with you to an extent, there’s no dishonour in going into PR, it’s not like people do it ‘just’ for the money, they do it because the journalism industry is collapsing.
I’m genuinely not sure how you can be a journalist ‘and’ work in PR though to be honest. A central pillar of journalism is its independence, and PR – no matter how subtle – is not independent, it’s always written with an end goal in mind.
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Honestly, would you trust any of the suits at the top of the UK regional media to run a whelk stall at a seafood convention?
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I saw two Newsquest weeklies littered with errors last month. Reporters reduced from six to three I was told plus other office economies. Their circulation figures have halved in five years.
Also, good tip-offs emailed in about usually unmissable strong stories were ignored and not followed up. Also, only brief mention of big fires and accidents with little or no follow-ups.
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Reporters receiving the shiny new Newsquest phones were only recently asked how many pictures they were taking – prophetic of what was to come.
The shameful aspect of this is that there are still many highly paid individuals within Newsquest more content to cling onto their own jobs than stand up for those below them who are paid far less.
Meanwhile, the remorseless pace of the cuts is only matched by the rush to the exits of the company’s younger journalists, usually lost to PR.
And yes – today’s leader page comment in the Echo. Oh what irony!
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Very sad. I was a sub at Northern echo 15 years ago and I remember the quality of the photographs. I also remember peter Barron as a great editor and the fact this has happened under his watch shows the scale of the problems facing our industry. Feels like the miners in the 1980s.
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Maybe I wasn’t as good as management said when I left but nearly two years on not one call for promised freelance. White man speak with forked tongue.
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RE: N Echo comment column – I suspect Peter Barron did it on purpose as one in the eye for the overlords. He is a decent bloke respected by his staff who is now in the spirit sapping position of most regional editors which is managing decline knowing there is no wriggle room. it’s all over!
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I agree with the comments above. It’s interesting re the comment about Peter Barron’s editorial in today’s Echo that it has been changed online and that comments cannot be left on the piece. It beggars belief that he could write this knowing what had just taken place. How crass and insensitive and it perhaps shows how little Newsquest bosses think of their staff
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IT’S QUITE SIMPLE (and yes I am shouting), IF YOU LOWER THE QUALITY OF YOUR PRODUCT AND INCREASE THE PRICE THEN EXPECT TO GO OUT OF BUSINESS!!!
CLOWNS!!!!!!!
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There are a lot of smart quips from the contributors to his story, but of solutions to the problem precious little.
You have falling circulations and falling revenues. Will employing more photographers change that?
There is one thing about taking photographs of an emotive subject like thousands of refugees pouring into Europe while David Cameron conducts a secret war against Syria.
It is quite another taking pictures for such a mundane subject as Mrs Moggins and her W.I.
The truth is that today there are hundreds of readers who can take the mundane photographs suitable for your average weekly, or even daily.
The skill of the photographer is best demonstrated on the world stage recording news which is of historical significance.
After all, lots of journalism start-ups use amateur photographs. Can we blame them for that??
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http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/picturegalleries/worldnews/11843440/The-power-of-photography-How-images-have-changed-world-opinions.html
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We should all mourn the passing of this latest squad of snappers and look sadly forward to the possibility of reporters being asked to take even more snaps plus a few lightning sketches for use when cameras aren’t available! In the early years reporters were told by NUJ and others not to take snaps or else there would be major fallings-out with snappers and even editors and company bosses who wanted no unrest and unpleasantness for a quiet life.
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Since photographers were made redundant where I work, reporters have been taking lots of photo’s, including features pics over two pages and even court snatches on mobile phones. So much for sticking together.
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Here’s my view for what it’s worth. First job was trainee reporter, did my NCE, became a sub, made it to deputy editor – left the industry about six years ago. I now work with a lot of graduates who are 23-26. They have never bought a local newspaper, would be quite strange if they did. They might follow a regional paper on Twitter (as I do), but I think they see themselves as people will move around the country, going to Uni, getting a job, moving on etc. The UK is their local, not a town/city. So they are interested in the national news sites for sure. They see their hyper local as their network on Facebook/Twitter/Whatsapp. I don’t have a solution – but I see the disconnect between regional news and people who only know a digital world. The only real monetisation I can see is selling content to nationals who spread it to their wider audience?
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