“With a week to go until the NUJ’s parlimentary lobby over local media cutbacks, more than seventy UK MPs have signed a motion on the issue,” the National Union of Journalists reports.
“The parliamentary petition regrets job cuts at profitable local media and calls on the government to give state support only in return for guarantees on investment in journalism,” the release continues.
Journalism.co.uk succumbs to linking another ‘top 10’ type list… This is from the Jill Geisler, group leader, Leadership and Management Programs, at the Poynter Institute.
“Dear Potential Employer:
Please accept this letter of recommendation for the journalist applying for your job opening…”
Followed by 10 reasons it’s a good idea to employ a journalist. Number one: “Journalists will improve the writing, photography, or design in your organisation.”
“Thousands of journalists at the BBC are to hold two national one-day strikes against compulsory redundancies,” the National Union of Journalists reports.
The focus is on cuts at the World Service’s South Asian section where up to 20 positions are at risk of being cut.
“NUJ members at the corporation voted 77 percent in favour of strike action in a national ballot,” the release said.
A motion was passed declaring that industrial action will take place on Friday 3 April and Thursday 9 April ‘in the event that further talks fail to resolve the issue’.
Journalists within GMG Regional Media ‘have declared a vote of no confidence in the Scott Trust Ltd over a decision to make sweeping job cuts’.
“Members at the NUJ chapel, which represents six weekly titles in the south of Greater Manchester unanimously passed the motion after the company announced 78 redundancies across GMG’s weekly titles and sister paper the Manchester Evening News,” the National Union of Journalists has announced.
According to the Indy’s Feral Beast, questions raised about executive bonuses at a Guardian News & Media meeting last week ‘were given short shrift’ by editor Alan Rusbridger.
Following his piece on the regional press on MediaGuardian.co.uk, Jon Slattery has published a series of full interviews with industry representatives from the UK’s regional press.
Speaking about the impact of job losses on journalists, an ex-editor says:
“There’s simply nothing out there. Six weeks ago they were an editor, a man of significant substance in their community; today they’re signing on.”
“I’ve seen both sides of the story,” writes Dan Mason, a former regional newspaper editor (Coventry Evening Telegraph and Birmingham Post) and most recently, managing editor of 12 weeklies in London.
His post looks at ‘five things journalists should do now – before they face the threat of redundancy’. “It’s a beginning more than an ending,” he writes.
Firstly, ‘understand the redundancy process clearly BEFORE it starts,’ he says.
A lovely graphic from NYTimes.com, showing the ‘bad news for newspapers’ in the US. Different coloured and sized circles show which parts of the US have been hardest hit when it comes to falling newspaper circulation. The larger the circle, the larger the circulation; the red circles indicate a circulation change of -20 per cent. Graphs at the bottom show advertising revenue of the largest public newspaper companies.
A big question indeed from the Independent’s Ian Burrell. He takes a look at issues affecting the performance of UK regional press and presents the ‘for’ and ‘against’ views on whether the ‘crisis’ matters.
Have regionals ‘had their day’? “Not at all,” the article says, at one point. “An impressive 82 per cent of UK adults read local newspapers, a level of penetration matched by no other medium except television.”
“The tension is unbearable. The office becomes like ‘Lord of the Flies’. We split into tribes and dredge up weaknesses in our colleagues. We speculate. We make lists. It’s our survival mechanism. It’s awful,” writes Sarah Slobin (@sarahslo) who was infographics director at Fortune magazine before being made redundant.
Here Slobin describes, in a personal and descriptive piece for an issue of ‘Design’, how ‘nothing stays the same’ when you’re made unemployed.