Laying off staff left, right and centre
I WAS the chief sub-editor at the East London and West Essex Guardian series until my position, along with all the other sub-editors, was made redundant last year.
The quality of the papers, owned by Newsquest, is suffering badly as reporters are being “re-moulded” into multi-skilled journalists and expected to report, take photographs, sub-edit and lay out pages for the Waltham Forest, Wanstead and Woodford and Epping Forest Guardian, with little or no training.
I took redundancy, without much option but with two weeks’ pay for every year worked; the company has just announced that there will be only one week per year for any further redundancies. Editorial staff have also been told that they can expect to take a week of unpaid leave during the coming year.
My understanding, after being with the paper since 2000 when I started as a reporter, is that the shareholders at Newsquest’s parent company Gannett in the US had been milking massive profits during the good years leading up to the current recession.
It would now appear that there is no cash left to ride out the bad times and, most worryingly, to protect the jobs of vulnerable staff like the trainee reporters and photographers who face the prospect of being axed. Other newspaper groups, like Trinity Mirror and Johnston Press, are also laying off staff left, right and centre as a consequence of nothing more than dismal mismanagement, short-sighted business acumen and, above all, greed.
A few years ago Newsquest’s CEO, Paul Davidson, boosted his six-figure salary with an additional six-figure bonus, in the same year that the company waived employees’ performance-related bonuses, informing them that revenue targets had been narrowly missed.
The primary purpose of working as a regional journalist is to defend the vulnerable and to act as watchdogs, reporting the kind of corruption which, it could be argued, the management and owners of our newspapers are themselves guilty of.
Most journalists who are now finding themselves out in the cold will more than likely move into PR or council-run publications which will begin to appear to readers as though they are the authoritative voices on local news and events. State-run propaganda machines will take the place of unblinkered, unbiased and independent reporting.
Let’s hope someone works out how to make local newspaper websites reap revenue soon; otherwise we could be heading towards a complete media meltdown. The worse case scenario could be that these much-valued and prized assets of our communities will disappear completely, taking with them the source of grass roots news that feeds our national media.
Darren Rackham
Epping, Essex