Journalists at 18 weekly newspapers owned by Johnston Press have threatened to strike over planned staffing cuts across the company.
The National Union of Journalists’ JP Central Scotland group chapel say there is a “strong feeling” for industrial action among its members, amid proposals which the union says could see up to 100 jobs lost across the UK.
As reported by HTFP earlier this month, Johnston Press told staff to expect a series of cutbacks across its business and promised a series of follow-up announcements giving more specific detail of how individual publishing centres are affected.
It is understood the company is seeking up to 32 voluntary redundancies across its Scotland operation, which includes The Scotsman, the Edinburgh Evening News and 28 weekly titles.
A statement issued by the chapel, which has 42 members, reads: “The news of another round of fresh redundancies has sickened staff once again. It seems the only way this company knows how to save money is to cut journalists from its newspapers or close offices and now more newspapers.
“The Central Scotland chapel was ready to submit a case to the company to demand more staff before this announcement due to staffing levels being so low at the moment, so staff are seriously concerned at even the mention of further cuts, which will ultimately increase already heavy workloads and seriously affect the quality of journalism we give our readers.
“From what we have been told, papers not performing as well as others will be resourced less using UGC and shared copy, which will ultimately mean less local news relevant to certain areas.
“We may have a chance of fighting the proposals through industrial action, including up to strike action, which there is a strong feeling for in this chapel.”
The chapel covers newspapers across Scotland’s central belt including the Falkirk Herald, Linlithgow Gazette, Bo’ness Journal. South Queensferry Gazette, Cumbernauld News, Kilsyth Chronicle, Motherwell Times and Bellshill Speaker.
It also has members working for the Fife Free Press, Fife Herald, East Fife Mail, St Andrews Citizen, Glenrothes Gazette, The Extra (Glasgow), Kirkintilloch & Bishopbriggs Herald, Milngavie & Bearsden Herald, Carluke Gazette and Lanark Gazette.
The union statement comes two days after JP signalled it may sell off some of its 200-plus newspapers across the UK.
Four of the newspapers potentially affected by the strike action – the East Fife Mail, Glasgow Extra, Glenrothes Gazette and Linlithgow Gazette – were this week among 59 titles labelled “sub-core” in an email to staff, although the company has denied this signifies any intention to sell them.
HTFP has asked Johnston Press for a comment on the chapel’s statement.
On the union’s job cut claims, the company has previously said: “The figures quoted by the NUJ are worst case scenario and we will only know the outcome after the consultation period.”
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Good stuff, worked for TM over the targets nonsense and it can work again, a line’s been drawn in the sand here. Best of luck.
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If you are going to strike make sure you stop the papers being published. You need the support of the print unions,if there still are any. Otherwise the management will just fill the papers with press releases and old news and still publish! Unless you hit them in their pocket they will take no notice. I have been through this in Yorkshire and believe me they will always have some brown nose who will work. Good luck to you all. You have my support and sympathy.
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Maybe add that they won’t take pics either!
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It’s bad but inevitable, I’m afraid. Circulations/revenues are plummeting for the big corporations, and with tiers of useless (as in lacking any specific media talents) suits to remunerate and shareholders to appease it will only get worse, despite industrial action. My advice to those still in the sector is prepare your exit strategy now; to those signing up to “journalism courses”, think again, save your money, and get into a career with a future. Good luck to all those talented media professionals under threat at JP – and perhaps some of suits could ease the pressure for a while by exercising their skills at plastic widget companies or whatever, which is where they’ll all be in a few years anyway.
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Quite frankly, what’s the point? Like they’ll take any notice and not just punish those taking action further down the line!
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I forgot to say , the one good thing about the cuts at our title was the people who decided who were to be made redundant, were themselves made redundant once they had done JPs dirty work. How we laughed.
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Young students shouldn’t give up! It’s a tough career choice at the moment, I should know I finished NCTJ at end of 2008 after a career change in my mid-30’s just as credit crunch started and the redundancies at local and regional papers (that had already been going on for some time) intensified. This made it almost impossible to get a job at a paper but I got good web editing and writing jobs and eventually managed to get shifts at the nationals. Wish I could have had a better grounding from working for locals or weeklies though. It is sad though, I remember doing work experience at Sussex Express in 1989 and there were at least a dozen, maybe 20 editorial staff and the paper was much better. Saying that, it is not 6x worse now even though there is probably only 3 editorial staff.
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Sadly, strike action is futile. Sycophants will fill the templates with copy from emails. It’s called ‘generic copy’. Readers will learn about the latest sighting of the Loch Ness Monster, the joys of acupuncture and how to make their lawns greener.
Circulations and the share price will continue to tumble, along with the numbers of journalists. Oh, the cover prices will continue to rise (the only aspect that JP doesn’t cut).
What a shambles. I’m delighted to be out of it.
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You’ve got to be bloody minded with JP because they are running their business and your livelihood into the ground.
What company would make a statement saying that nearly half its products were rubbish? How is that supposed to go down with shareholders and staffs?
Top management will jump ship and get good jobs with dinosaurs like the BBC, leaving employees to pick up the pieces of their wrecked careers.
You are fighting for your families as well as your jobs and local communities.
Bring what you do to the attention of readers and the general public so that when you launch your hyperlocal, people will know what it is about.
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@dick is correct on all points and the exit strategy is one Ive been urging anyone in regional press, journalists or commercial people alike, to put in place asap especially if you have years of working life ahead of you.
There’s no long term future in local regional news papers,just read the news on HTFP through last year and this year so far if you need convincing, they’re like a punch drunk boxer on the ropes, clinging on round by round knowing that sooner or later the final blow will come or the guys in the suits will throw in the towel and call time.
I remember a well respected commercial chap telling us he was party to some of the decisions being made and it all pointed to a rapid move from print to on line and to an eventual cessation of printed papers due to the cost to produce them when an ‘electronic ‘ ad and news website cost next to nothing but most of us took it with a pinch of salt, my how wrong we were.
so take my advice as one with over 25 years in the regional press and get your plans in place now and look for other, better options that may not pay as much but will give you less stress,worry and a better quality of life.
There will always work for good people prepared to go and find it as many who’ve left are already are finding out and watching the implosion unfold from a distance.
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Dont think a strike will achieve much. The company is being broken up. The league table announcement is an invitation to buy Uber, Primary and Core titles. Sub-core titles will be thrown into any deal for free so that regional groups are completely off loaded. The tables bear no resemblance to reality, they’re just a sales tactic.
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Agree, if you don’t stop the paper from coming out it’s pointless.
A one day strike on weekly will make no difference at all
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JP doesn’t employ any journalists so make sure notice is given to the group you actually work for, rather than the parent company.
There are other ways of making your feelings felt. Ask JP to consider the health and safety implications of making jobs redundant. Ask how they intend to carry out the work previously done by those who will be leaving the company. Log your hours so that you can prove whether or not you have time to take on any extra work.
I’m a bit rusty on the details now but unless you’ve opted out of the working time regulations you should only be working 48 hours a week maximum (taken over 17 working weeks).
Clearly, nobody objects to working extra hours for a big breaking story, but you do have options other than a strike to explore.
Speaking from experience, redundancies of excellent and able friends resulted in me having a ludicrous amount of extra work but I had a good editor who could see the problem and sorted it out.
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My girl friend reminds me that on one JP paper she once worked for the whole editorial staff quit in protest at staffing levels. The office was closed thought the paper limps on under remote control.
Good luck with action but we all know JP are both desperate and ruthless.
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Futile potential action. JP is stripping journalism from its newspapers. The plan is for cheap (although journalists’ are very cheap given their qualifications and the average salary) staff to rehash/lift press releases and UGC. There is plenty of that stuff around and if staff strike there is no shortage of people willing to fill the templates and ensure papers are printed. The NUJ has proved itself ineffective whilst the industry plunges into terminal decline. Those left working in editorial need to stop kidding themselves. There is no future, JP is not suddenly going to become awash with money and invest in journalism and jobs. Its latest panic action to keep six-figure (or seven for AH) remuneration for executives going a bit longer is to offload low-circulation papers. That won’t work either. These brands will have lost perhaps 60-70% of sales from the peak figures. In other words the local communities have turned their back on them and they are worth very little – and it seems advertisers are now realising they are paying a high price for fewer readers and there are alternative options. Anyone with money to invest in newspapers might as well start from scratch and not be tainted by failed brands.
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Non-story, posited on 42 NUJ members (is this majority of editorial staff?) having “strong feeling” for industrial action. And what does that entail? One-hour token stoppage on quiet day, or all out, stay out, which ain’t going to happen. So let’s all move along – nothing to see here.
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it’s all over rover but police crime commissioners are recruiting
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Benji Sussex.
As a non-journo I visited the old Sussex Express office several times a few years back and it was once one of the best papers in Sussex covering an enormous area very well.
It seems from people who worked there that resources were centred long ago on the “sister” County Times at Horsham and staff lost at both the Sussex Express and Mid Sussex Times (Haywards Heath) and not replaced.
To add insult to injury I hear both papers had their offices shut and are now written from other towns. It seems bizarre to me that JP does not think it important to have the Express in what is the capital of East Sussex. Hard to see where JP goes from here, but good luck to anyone in newspapers. Sadly, I feel they might need it.
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Re: The Dead Digital Horse’s comment: How does calling anything “sub-core” make it attractive to potential buyers? It’s like trying to sell a car with no doors and only three wheels. JP probably now realises it was uber-foolish to make that document public as it served only to insult and alienate staff, advertisers, and readers in one fell swoop. Good work, JP top brass!
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go or it just to cause trouble – you have nowt to lose – it’s all knacked anyway so go out with your balls in the air!
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Reporters, stop taking photos and stop sourcing photos. That’s the job of photographers and picture editors. You are employed to write.
Unless everyone is a member of the Union a strike is pointless as the paper will get out. They will use subbing hubs and other papers not striking.
So, get 100% membership, get 100% to strike, strike for a whole week. If you can’t do that, either lump it or apply for redundancy. Sorry, a strike is only effective if I means the paper is at serious risk of not getting published.
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Futile. Why not just go to work and do as little as possible? I know a bloke who edited five newspapers and he did that throughout hs career. Ended up as a director of JP as it happens 😉
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Poor old NUJ. Damned if it does. Damned if it doesn’t!
I quit JP because of my group editors’s apathy about severe staff shortages and falling quality, and despite initial sadness (one week) have never regretted it.
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I’m in the happy position that I left JP recently. It leaves my former publication with an ‘editor’ (contents manager, or whatever) who is in charge of three papers. And my old paper now has two reporters, one for news and one for sport. How can any company treat human beings with such utter contempt? A modern-day William Wilberforce is required.
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attitudes on this comment thread (plus just about any other comment thread on this site) are precisely why the regional press is in such trouble in the first place.
fashionable and easy to blame “the suits” .. but who exactly is responsible for the double-digit decline in sales of all these newspapers? the suits, or the editorial staff who woke up way too late to the digital revolution.
of course, the worst of the worst are the all-too-common types on this thread who end with a “glad I’m out of it.”
Frankly, chums, we are ALL glad you’re out of it. The rest of us have got half a chance now that your poisonous neanderthal newsroom attitudes have left the building.
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Mark, I moved to my last daily newspaper back in the late 1980s solely because they had introduced new tech when my old daily was dragging its feet. While there I absolutely loved making up pages on Quark and its successors. I applaud every new media move we introduced. What none of us saw was that newspaper firms would use this technology to dispense with snappers, subs and now, reporters.
I admit I haven’t bought a daily paper in months and I haven’t bought a Sunday paper in years. This is because, like everyone else, I now read them online free. And I’m afraid that’s why newspapers have lost circulation.
Did we see it coming? We were too busy at our desks but I’ve long thought that a newspaper website should be a portal to all sorts of other content. The problem is that newspaper companies don’t share my view.
I’m glad you feel you’ve now got a chance in your career, good luck and I hope you have a great time.
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@mark ronson: speak for yourself ‘chum’. As a poisonous neanderthal newsroom person I can well remember many of us badgering the management (or ‘suits’, if you prefer) to include editorial in the digital revolution when it became obvious it was the next big thing (nearly 20 years ago.) Management, still raking in the profits from print like there was no tomorrow, took no notice. Many of them have since departed this business, taking their pretty hefty payouts with them. Meanwhile, the rest of us are suffering the consequences of a regime which saw no further than squeezing the last extra ounce of profit out of print before riding off into the sunset. Bitter? Only a little.
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I work in national newspapers. In 2006 I had a meeting with a number of executives from a regional newspaper group and was effusive about the effect Mail Online, then in its infancy, was having on the national sector. I was excited because, for the first time in many years, we were seeing a very substantial investment in news which appeared to be having some effect on readership and which others were likely to follow. When I’d finished speaking the most senior of the regional executives said: “I’m interested that you use the word investment, because I view that as a cost.” That attitude pervaded among the movers and shakers in regional newspapers for far too long and we are now seeing the results.
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@ Mark Ronson, stick to making crap records son.
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Tried to persuade a suit that I needed broadband in my solo office because the Stone Age dial up was too unreliable and inefficient. That was in about 2010. He said no. Too costly apparently. Who’s the Neanderthal Mark?
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