TM ‘spurned chance to save titles and jobs’
THE TRINITY Mirror group has been accused of closing down weekly titles in the West Midlands while negotiations were in hand to sell them as going concerns.
The accusation came as the company prepared yet another round of cuts — switching the morning Birmingham Post to a weekly and the Evening Mail to overnight production, with 85 jobs to go — on top of closing nine of its weeklies.
The NUJ had predicted all these moves in June but the company refused to confirm them. The Birmingham chapel put forward a business plan to save the weeklies and the 94 jobs TM then said it wanted to ditch, but TM pressed on with its closure plans and the chapel — together with the sister chapel in Coventry — voted for strike action. The strikes were called off when the company agreed not to enforce compulsory redundancies.
Last year more than 70 jobs were lost when the Birmingham daily and weekly titles were relocated as an integrated print and online operation.
The would-be rescuer of some of the weeklies was Chris Bullivant, whose firm publishes other weeklies in the region. He released an email exchange showing that he was offering to save four of the titles that have closed, in Burton, Walsall, Lichfield and Tamworth.
Chris Bullivant said he had raised £400,000 capital to keep the titles going and a sale would have saved Trinity Mirror £1 million in redundancy and other costs.
He wrote to TM’s director of corporate development, Phil Machray: “You have chosen to close them and offer no explanation either for taking that course of action or for refusing to continue our dialogue ... I am angered by what I perceive as the cavalier way TM close venerable newspapers and dispense with many valuable personnel without seeming to give a damn.”
NUJ North of England Organiser Chris Morley — who for years was a journalist and Father of the Chapel at the Post and Mail — said: “People in the towns evacuated by Trinity Mirror will no doubt ask why they lost their newspapers when there was a likely buyer knocking on the door. The shareholders may well be asking why hundreds of thousands of pounds potentially on offer was shunned.
“The company should come clean about its dealings and tell us why more was not done to save those titles it has closed.”
QUALITY newspapers like the Birmingham Post and Mail must be maintained as a vital part of a democratic society, NUJ North of England organiser Chris Morley told a debate at the Birmingham Press Club.
“There has been a wilful debauchery of profit taking by media companies without an eye for the future,” he said. “Papers like the Post and Mail must survive. Without them, you’re not going to get your court cases covered, local councils brought to account. You will not have dodgy businessmen investigated.
“The newspapers do things that no website ever does. You have to have properly resourced journalists doing their jobs where they are not under huge pressures every day.”
Another panellist was local paper publisher Chris Bullivant, who said the Birmingham titles needed new owners: “The Mail is being run by remote control from London and it needs local people coming in to run it. It is saveable.”