Almost 50 print jobs are under threat as publisher Trinity Mirror rolls out its ‘Live’ online brand to seven of its regional dailies.
Following the rebranding of the Birmingham Mail website as BirminghamLive in an attempt to create a “standalone digital business,” TM now plans to extend the model across other titles in the Midlands and Bristol.
It means the online channels of seven of the group’s Midlands dailies, along with the Bristol Post, will no longer bear the name of their associated newspaper.
The company says 49 editorial positions are at risk of redundancy as a result of the changes, the majority of which are likely to be print-related roles.
Somerset Live, one of the Trinity Mirror websites already run under the ‘Live’ brand
The Post’s online operation will now become known as Bristol Live, while the sites of Stoke daily The Sentinel, the Coventry Telegraph, Derby Telegraph, Nottingham Post and Leicester Mercury will also be renamed.
They will become known as Stokeontrent Live, Coventry Live, Derbyshire Live, Nottinghamshire Live and Leicestershire Live respectively.
In addition, the Burton Mail’s digital operation will be absorbed by Derbyshire Live, although Burton is itself in Staffordshire, while the Bath Chronicle’s site will become part of the existing Somerset Live platform.
However the Liverpool Echo website will retain the newspaper brand name although its newsroom will move to the Live content model, which TM said “places a greater emphasis on engaging local audiences to become loyal readers online.”
Earlier this month the Birmingham Mail rebranded online as Birmingham Live, with print and digital teams being independent from one another within the newsroom.
The change, originally announced last September, resulted in what the company described as “a small net reduction in newsroom roles.”
TM said in a statement today: “Last autumn the Birmingham Mail began to pilot a new publishing approach aimed at creating a completely standalone and sustainable digital business under the new brand of BirminghamLive.
“We have been very pleased with the progress made in Birmingham where audience numbers are showing healthy increases since the switch to BirminghamLive, and today we are announcing plans to extend the model across the West and East Midlands, and our Bristol/Gloucester/Somerset/ Dorset regions.
“We are also continuing to refine our print production operations in some of these regions.
“Our proposals will result in up to 49 roles being at risk of redundancy and we have today entered into consultation with those affected. The majority are likely to be print related roles.”
It is not the first time some of the titles involved in the rebrand will have had different web branding from the newspaper name.
For much of the past two decades, the former Northcliffe/Local World titles in the Midlands used the thisis brand online, for example thisisderbyshire.co.uk, while in the 2000s several of TM’s big city titles used the online ‘ic’ branding, for instance icbirmingham and icliverpool.
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More jobs to go just days after the Express Group takeover was announced. Not a coincidence, I’m guessing.
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And we old-timers are supposed to be the ones out of touch?
How can any pretence of quality be upheld with a further round of job cuts?
I’m sure someone from TM will be around shortly to talk up how well the digital programme is going.
But we all know the truth. TM is slowly killing off once-great titles.
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The majority are likely to be print related roles.”
How many print related roles are there any more? A few subs???
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Leicestershire Live, for example, sounds OK for re-branding digital.
Will newspapers be re-branded with names like Leicestershire Dead I wonder?
Can’t be long now.
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Since dropping its Saturday edition in May 2012, the Bristol Post has no longer been a ‘daily’ paper – even in the conventional newspaper sense of publishing six days a week. It currently appears only Monday to Friday.
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“We are also continuing to refine our print production operations…” ‘Refine’ seems a euphemism for ‘slash’ or ‘partially destroy’.
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I suppose all journalists are “print related”….
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Not just print journalists affected. Digital too. Bl**dy good people. Trinity Mirror ‘papers’ have morphed into clickbait UniLad productions in desperate bid to survive. So sad to see local journalism destroyed as it’s key to policing corruption. To all those affected, your skills are desired elsewhere. There is life outside newspapers.
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Disgrace.
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Saddenedjourno
yes no doubt we will get the usual ‘ crisis what crisis?’ and ‘digital is fantastic and it’s the future even though there’s no money in it ‘ line from their spokesperson but more cuts just emphasise how bad things must be if they see a further reduction in quality stafff as the way forward.
And yes @Louisa, there’s a great future outside of the ailing,once big publishers with the huge number of credible smaller independent publishers opening up on territories where the dinosaurs no longer roam producing good papers of interest and appeal to local communities.
Good luck to those affected , you’re the lucky ones
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Totally agree with Louisa, my local papers Facebook page is now full of articles designed to generate maximum facebook outrage from different regions to chase clicks. Either that or vaguely generic articles or listicles. They are just turning into yet another facebook page similar to a million others.
The local news content has really dropped off as they chase facebook likes and comments.
It makes you wonder if TM’s end goal is to produce large regionalised websites with very few staff. This can’t be a good business model for quality regional journalism.
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Birmingham Live looks little different to the predecessor Birmingham Mail website and indeed very similar to Gloucestershire Live.
It still consists generally of badly-written clickbait-headlined tosh – mainly jammed together in no particular order by ‘reporters’ from other people’s tweets and Facebook posts – and interspersed with irrelevant links, old stock pictures, unrelated videos and irritating adverts.
Take a typical report of a road accident: the same scant information repeated three times in different ways as gleaned from police, fire and ambulance service tweets, with, if lucky, a distant grainy picture from someone’s phone. No attempt is ever made to follow up, for example to find out the consequences in terms of injuries or charges – because ‘reporters’ with the attention span of forgetful goldfish just move on to the next shiny distraction on which to put a sensationalised headline.
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How odd that TM is sacking 50-odd people just after launching a recruitment campaign for 55 reporters funded by the BBC.
https://www.holdthefrontpage.co.uk/jobsboard/view/local-democracy-reporters-various/
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Pete
What ever can you be implying sir??
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