Who needs subs?
Getting rid of subs is a managers’ fantasy. Look at the money you can save. And stories don’t really need checking, do they? MARTIN CHAMBERS reports on how a daily paper group in East Anglia is trying to eliminate the subbing function from its daytime operations — and what is likely to happen if it succeeds.
WHAT MAKES a newspaper? That’s the question staff at Archant Suffolk have been asking since a decision by the company to get rid of trained journalists on its day-time sub-editing team and replace them with advertisement designers.
Three shifts of sub-editors currently turn reporters’ words into readable, intelligent and well laid-out news pages for both the Ipswich Evening Star and the East Anglian Daily Times, but not for much longer.
Management has announced that it is cutting its subbing staff, and removing the daytime shift completely. A team of nine ad designers, paid £18,500 a year rather than the sub-editors’ wage of £26,100, will churn out the pages, with just a proof reader or “editorial quality controller”, a team leader and a deputy team leader to try to prevent the papers from being summoned for contempt, sued for libel or held up as a public laughing stock.
Under management’s new, more “efficient” regime, the “page designers” [ad designers] will receive “previously subbed copy, headlines and pictures” and put them into pages. “Their work will be signed off by experienced staff,” they said.
“The commissioning desk (news, sport or features) will have responsibility for ensuring the accuracy and legality of all copy being handled by page designers. The relevant desk will then add a suggested headline at the top of the copy. It will be a headline which can have a word or two added, or taken away, to enable it to fit.
“The copy will then be allocated to the page for the page designer (ad designer) to pick up. After the page has been designed, the proof will be passed to either the editorial quality controller or to the day team leader or the day deputy team leader. These three people will have primary responsibility for proofing pages.” Then it’s back again to the commissioning desk for another look, where practicality allows, and away goes the page.
Pages will be divided into “type one” and “type two”, with page editors (subs) able to work on both, and page designers (ad designers) able to work on type two pages only. Type two pages will include “all weeklies pages, many of the early and overnight and feature pages on the daily titles, and all pages within our commercial supplements” (ie, everything not arriving in the system late). However, they do expect a page editor (sub) to deal with “the legal minefield of the readers’ letters pages, even though they are designed (subbed) during the day”.
Just for good measure, management has also announced a pay freeze for the remaining sub-editors. Unsurprisingly, a number of them look likely to opt for the not-very-generous redundancy package rather than hang around and find out how this marvellous new system will work in practice.
Beyond the obvious effect for those about to lose their jobs, does any of this matter? The answer depends on whether you believe that the concept of a newspaper, and journalism itself, is still relevant. If your pages are not sub-edited by journalists, your photos are not taken by the newspapers’ professional team — as happens with depressing regularity — and your copy is written by non-journalists, as seems more likely to occur in future, can what is produced be regarded as a newspaper?
Obviously there are exceptions, but most people in the industry would say that a newspaper distinguishes itself from a fanzine, a blog, a parish magazine, a newsletter, a political pamphlet or any other disposable printed matter, by the people who create it. A newspaper is more than the paper it’s printed on. Journalists are the newspaper.
Needless to say, the NUJ has strongly opposed these cuts, arguing that they will have terrible consequences for the newspaper industry as a whole, and for journalists working in it. The union has launched an online petition and a letter-writing campaign aimed at people of influence in the papers’ circulation area.
The NUJ Suffolk Branch took the issue to the annual conference in Belfast last month, where delegate Tony Shevlin spoke of a story in an Archant freesheet, on a page produced by non-journalists, that committed a grotesque contempt of court just before the trial of the man now convicted of murdering five local women. “Luckily the judge did not read the paper,” he said.
Again in April an Archant freesheet carried a story under this headline: “Man sort after damage to car in supermarket”. Archant should really have “sort” a different means of achieving its so-called “efficiency” targets.