Staff will fight for oldest Sunday paper
JOURNALISTS on the Guardian and Observer in London have unanimously condemned plans to downgrade the 200-year-old Sunday newspaper. Management at the Guardian group is considering the closure of the Observer or its conversion into a weekly magazine.
The NUJ chapel has vowed to fight to save the paper and to resist compulsory redundancies.
It said: “The survival of the Observer as the world’s oldest Sunday newspaper is essential for the protection of pluralism and diversity in the British media. The chapel calls on management to reject proposals to drop the title, downgrade it to a weekly magazine or undermine its character as an independent and competitive Sunday newspaper.”
Barry Fitzpatrick, head of the NUJ publishing department, said: “The Observer has many thousands of loyal readers, and workers who are committed to seeing the paper succeed. To close it would be throwing away all that goodwill.
“It would be foolhardy of management to think the company’s problems could be solved with such a simplistic and ill-conceived approach. The NUJ will support the chapel in its fight against potential cutbacks.”