300 Trinity Mirror staff must reapply for jobs
By Leah McBride Mensching, Thursday 21 August 2008 at 19:39 :: Labor & Employment :: #2150 :: rss
All 300 editorial employees at Trinity Mirror's newspapers in the Midlands area of the United Kingdom were made redundant, and have been asked to apply for new jobs “as part of radical plans to overhaul the company's publishing operation in the region,” MediaGuardian reported Wednesday.
Staffers in all editorial jobs at the group's regional dailies, including the Birmingham Post, Coventry Telegraph and the Birmingham Mail, as well as about 40 weeklies, were told Wednesday that their jobs will be obsolete, and they will have to apply for new positions. However, there are about 65 fewer jobs than there are employees who have been made redundant.
Jeremy Dear, general secretary of the National Union of Journalists told MediaGuardian that Trinity Mirror plans to set up a new editorial system, cutting a large number of staffers in the process.
“It's inevitable that those who remain will be expected to carry a greater burden of work – and that has implications for the lives of everyone working on the papers, not to mention the long-term future of quality journalism at the titles,” he told MediaGuardian. “People are scared about whether they'll have a job later this year and, if they do manage to keep their job, they're nervous about whether they'll be able to cope with the added workload that's clearly on the horizon.”
Trinity Mirror is launching two integrated multimedia newsrooms in Birmingham and Coventry that will create editorial content for five titles. It has began a 90-day consultation period with employees about the proposed changes, MediaGuardian reported.
One Midlands employee told MediaGuardian that employees had been expecting some sort of announcement, but the drastic changes announced were “a bit of a shock.”
“There will be a number of people who will take redundancy. The changes are quite big and there will be some people who feel that all the retraining is going to be so big it's not something they are going to want to go through,” the employee said, according to MediaGuardian.
Trinity Mirror is also looking to sell several paid and free titles from its Midlands newspapers, including four weekly titles in Northampton and two paid weeklies and a free title in Long Eaton.
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