Tag Archives: National Union of Journalists

Strike dates announced at Newsquest South London

Journalists at titles within Newsquest South London have announced that their planned strike action will take place on Wednesday and Thursday next week (15 and 16 June). The strikes follow a dispute over redundancies, a reduction in editorial space, a review of a 2 per cent pay rise and an office relocation.

At the end of May Journalism.co.uk reported that members of the National Union of Journalists at Newsquest South London voted in favour of strike action, with 22 out of 23 returns of a ballot in favour.

Staff at newspapers in the area, which covers Surrey, Sutton and Twickenham, have been working to rule since 15 April.

NUJ head of publishing Barry Fitzpatrick said: “Our members’ overwhelming decision to take strike action in defence of jobs and quality was the inevitable result of a wrong-headed management policy. But it is not too late for the company to show some sense and sit down with us to discuss the future security of the papers which are so important to our members and their communities.”

Earlier last month the division announced 12 job cuts at a series of titles in the area, including the loss of the sports and leisure department at one of the South London offices.

Poor investment and low morale highlighted in NUJ letter to Johnston Press shareholders

The National Union of Journalists has called on Johnston Press shareholders to encourage management to work with the union.

In an open letter, published on its website, being presented to the publisher’s shareholder’s at an AGM today, the union criticises cuts at Johnston Press.

The Johnston Press annual report boasts about ‘local content’, ‘teams of local experts’ and proclaims that ‘Content is King’. Yet behind the corporate jargon, the company has reduced staff in its editorial teams dramatically in the last 12 months, with so-called ‘back-office functions’ – which include newspaper content creators – being moved sometimes miles away from the communities they serve.

The much-hailed new content management system is ‘operational’ across the business. This is purely down to the hard work of journalists. The company’s failure to invest in new hardware made the shaky implementation of the system exceedingly difficult. Similar systems have been introduced successfully at other newspaper groups who recognised this was a key investment that couldn’t be brought in on the cheap.

Over 230 editorial staff have been made redundant; significantly, 85 per cent volunteered to leave, a testament to the poor morale amongst staff. Those made compulsory redundant were often treated badly – in some cases individuals were given only a few hours to make a choice between a huge pay cut and imposed relocation or being forced to leave. All of this has taken place at a company that claims to belong to ‘Investors in People’.

London protest planned in support of journalists imprisoned in Libya

A protest will take place on Thursday in support of three Al Jazeera journalists captured in Libya in March.

A video on Al Jazeera English’s YouTube channel says Ahmad val ould Eddin and cameramen Ammar Al-Hamdan and Kamel Al Tallou are being held illegally.

According to this article on Al Jazeera’s website, the three were held near Zintan in the northwest of the country and then imprisoned in Tripoli. The broadcaster says it has no information on why the trio are being held.

The National Union of Journalists is joining the protest, which will take place between noon and 4pm in front of the Libyan Embassy in Knightsbridge, London.

“We are demonstrating in support of our Al Jazeera colleagues because it is vital to their safety that attention is focused on their plight at a time when the enormity of events in Libya might cause them to be forgotten,” NUJ general secretary Jeremy Dear said in a statement.

Cameroon journalist fighting deportation has hearing delayed until March

Cameroon journalist Charles Atangana, who is fighting deportation from the UK, will have to wait until March to find out whether he can stay in the UK after a judicial review hearing was withdrawn following the submission of new documentation to the Home Office.

According to a release from the union today, Atangana is currently pursuing a fresh asylum claim which has been rejected by the Home Office already but given the right to appeal.

Atangana, who is a member of the National Union of Journalists, claims he was tortured and detained for his writing in his home country, which he fled in 2004.

The economics and current affairs reporter was due to be deported back to Cameroon in August last year but was granted a reprieve following an ongoing campaign by the NUJ.

His appeal will be heard at the First Tier Tribunal at Taylor House on 14 March.

NUJ: Bolton strike on, Sheffield strike off

Journalists at the Newsquest-owned Bolton News voted yesterday to strike in protest against an ongoing pay freeze.

Twenty-one NUJ members took part in the ballot, with 16 voting in favour of strike action, the union said in a release.

NUJ deputy general secretary Michelle Stanistreet said: “Newsquest and its American owners have been relentless in their pursuit of higher profits at the expense of journalists.

“The growing anger amongst journalists throughout the group and their determination to bring the company to the negotiating table is clear.”

Newsquest has suffered a series of strikes in recent months as a result of its ongoing pay freeze and relocation of production staff.

The company brought the pay freeze to an end at the end of last year with a 2 per cent pay offer, but only for certain titles. In contrast, staff across titles in Wales, Gloucestershire, and the South Midlands were recently asked to take a week’s unpaid leave in order to help control costs.

Meanwhile, NUJ members working for Johnston Press in Sheffield have called off planned strikes after reaching a deal with management over plans to cut production jobs at a centralised “editorial hub” in the city.

The Sheffield hub produces pages for a range of Johnston Press titles in Sheffield, Doncaster, Chesterfield and North and Mid Derbyshire and South, West and North Yorkshire.

Newsquest: An update on the reported pay freeze thaw

There have been several reports this week that a long-standing, group-wide pay freeze at Newsquest has shown signs of thawing. Journalism.co.uk has reported extensively on the National Union of Journalists’ (NUJ) campaign against the pay freeze and the series of strikes that have taken place at Newsquest titles in the past few months.

So has the pay freeze been lifted? Unfortunately, it’s not as straightforward as that. Here’s what we know:

  • An NUJ update and official has confirmed that a 2 per cent pay increase has been offered at some Newsquest centres;
  • The centres that have been confirmed so far are Bradford, York and Darlington;
  • The NUJ has not yet returned our calls to confirm what centres, if any, in the south or Scotland have been made an offer;
  • Journalism.co.uk has learned that in the current offers, no move to backdating pay has been included;
  • The date from which a pay increase would take place – if the offers are accepted – depends on each centre’s “pay anniversary”, a date agreed between NUJ chapels and management when new pay or holiday settlements would be introduced.

A step in the right direction – but there’s more to come on this story…

NUJ members at Newsquest submit claim for 5 to 8% pay rise

National Union of Journalists (NUJ) members at Newsquest submitted this year’s pay claim yesterday and asked for a 5 to 8 per cent rise, according to the union.

The union is concerned that an ongoing pay freeze at the publisher combined with increases in the cost of living and new contracts offered by the group that rule out annual pay reviews will establish low pay as part of a journalist’s job, regardless of company profit levels.

The NUJ is also fighting Newsquest’s plans to close final salary pension schemes for staff.

Full statement on the NUJ website at this link…

Johnston Press Atex system is bad news, but the death of the sub-editor is inevitable

Last month Johnston Press journalists, enraged by a new publishing strategy and online/print content management system (CMS) called Atex, voted for group-wide industrial action. Atex will make reporters responsible for subbing and editing their own newspaper stories using pre-made templates. The vote was thwarted by a High Court challenge; a re-ballot is underway.

Now several other companies including Archant are either using or considering using the same system.

The NUJ has a point when they say that with fewer staff and less checks and balances, more errors will get through – this aberration of a front page in the JP-owned Bedfordshire Times & Citizen recently is a classic example.

Yesterday I questioned exactly why the union was opposing Atex; included in the union’s greviances were baffling and unexplained “health and safety” concerns. The union later told Journalism.co.uk that they meant that it adds to staff stress levels.

But, I went on in conversations both online and privately, isn’t this part of a wider problem? The NUJ has a fundamental belief that sub-editors should sub stories and reporters write them. Like the pre-Wapping ihousen-printers that jealously guarded their very specific, outdated roles, the ideal outcome for the union is to maintain the status quo and protect jobs.

The reality isn’t quite that simple. Atex, as more than one person said, is far from the innovative answer that newspapers need. One person with knowledge of how Atex works, who works for a company that is planing to implement it and asked not to be named, put it to me like this:

We’re still in transition in my newsroom at the moment – we haven’t switched to using it for the web yet. However, if the system goes ahead as planned we will not be able to insert in-line links into stories, nor will we be able to embed content from anywhere else online. It’s possible to build link boxes that sit next to web stories, but it’s time consuming compared to in-line links – and if our current CMS is anything to go by, in the press of a busy newsroom, it won’t get done.

That sounds like a retrograde step. Far from holding back innovation, it sounds like JP journalists are right to oppose the move. This is from a company whose former chairman of nine years, Roger Parry, last week criticised the very board that he chaired for not investing enough in digital media (via Press Gazette). Exactly who else is there to blame?

But it gets worse:

For those of us who possess data skills and want to make mashups, visualisations and so on, this is a massive inhibition – even if we find the time to innovate or create something really special for our papers, we’ll have no outlet for it. It also means we can’t source video or images for our stories in innovative ways – no YouTube embeds or Flickr slideshows – cutting us off from huge resources that could save time, energy and money while enhancing our web offering.

It’s astonishing that we’re even considering such a backwards step to a presumably costly proprietory system when so many cheaper, more flexible, open source solutions exist for the web.

Regional reporters, web editors and even overall editors will read that and find this frustration of digital ideas by technical, budgetary limitations very familiar. The last point rings loudest of all: cheap, dynamic blogging solutions like WordPress and Typepad provide all newsrooms need to create a respectable news site. Publishing executives seem to find it hard to believe that something free to use can be any good, but just look at what’s coming in the in-beta WordPress 3.0 (via @CasJam on Mashable).

So the union’s misgivings in this case appear to be well placed. The drop in quality from Johnston’s cost-cutting is there for all to see in horrendous subbing errors, thinner editions and entire towns going without proper coverage.

Unfortunately, journalists have to accept that no amount of striking is going to bring back the staff that have gone and that times have changed. Carolyn McCall’s parting shot as CEO of Guardian Media Group was to repeat her prediction (via FT.com) that advertising revenues will never return to pre-recession levels – and don’t forget Claire Enders’ laugh-a-minute performance at the House of Commons media select committee, in which she predicted the death of half the country’s 1,300 local and regional titles in the next five years.

Regional publishers may not all have a solution that combines online editorial innovation with a digital business model right now. But to get to that point, reporters will have to cooperate and accept that their roles have changed forever – “sub-editor” may be a term journalists joining the industry in five years will never hear.

Patrick Smith is a freelance journalist, event organiser and formerly a correspondent for paidContent:UK and Press Gazette. He blogs at psmithjournalist.com and is @psmith on twitter.

NUJ: Johnston Press blocks staff strike with legal action

The National Union of Journalists (NUJ) has called off planned strike action by members at Johnston Press titles scheduled for tomorrow after the publisher sought help from the High Court by claiming that it doesn’t employ any journalists, reports the NUJ.

Johnston Press spent enormous time and effort putting together a 600-page submission to prove that – despite the JP stamp on the pay slips of staff working on their titles; the JP company handbook issued to all staff; the Johnston Press plc intranet that publishes company-wide procedures including policies on grievance, disciplinary procedure and health and safety; despite the group’s claims in the  annual report, in company bulletins and external publications that it employs 1,900 journalists and more than 7,000 employees – that JP “employs no journalists”.

The union will re-ballot 550 members at Johnston Press, who were due to strike in reaction to closure of a pension scheme, a group-wide pay freeze and the introduction of a new content management system.

Says NUJ general secretary Jeremy Dear:

Johnston Press management’s claim that it employs no journalists would be laughable, did it not have such serious implications for industrial relations in the UK. It’s clearly part of an emerging trend amongst employers to derail democratically agreed industrial action by skilfully exploiting the anti-trade union laws. In this case, by creating a web of subsidiary companies set up as multiple employers, JP management has been able to argue at the High Court that our dispute around group-wide pay and the introduction of a new content management system across the titles is, in fact, a series of identical disputes with JP’s multiple subsidiaries.

Full story at this link…

Freelancers step up campaign against Bauer contracts

Freelancers at Bauer Media are continuing to protest against new contracts which they claim remove copyright from contributors.

The freelancers say that Q and Kerrang! started enforcing the contract yesterday. “Freelances who haven’t signed can’t get work from either title as of now,” the group said, via Twitter.

Tonight (5 May) there will be a meeting for all Bauer contributors in London. Details can be found at http://www.londonfreelance.org/fl/1005grab2.html.

Last week the National Union of Journalists, which is supporting the campaign, said that over 200 freelance journalists are challenging the new contracts. “The impasse has reached crisis point,” says the NUJ.

For the back story and Bauer’s own statement, issued last month, follow this link.