Newsquest was looking for one redundancy from the Milford Mercury and Western Telegraph reporting team. Instead, all four reporters agreed to an equal cut in hours.
“I was the Gazette’s one-man sports department from the Saturday through to the Wednesday when the editions rolled off that newly-bent, L-shaped press to be delivered to the three corners of Wiltshire on the Thursday,” writes Waghorn. Now, the job is dead. He takes a look at ‘a sign of the times’.
My colleague Judith made a valiant effort getting our 12 days of Christmas for journalists to fall into rhythm – glad we didn’t attempt the below, created by writer Bill Dyszel (found at mediabistro.com):
Herald Group’s National Union of Journalists (NUJ) reps have hired employment lawyers following claims that staff could lose redundancy benefits if they do not either volunteer for redundancy or reapply for a position.
Last month publishers Newquest told 250 journalists and production staff they must reapply for 30-40 fewer jobs or face redundancy in 90 days.
iwantmyrocky.com, launched at the weekend, is ‘a vehicle’ for staffers at the Rocky Mountain News to highlight why their newspaper is worth saving, SFNblog reports.
Having set up a timeline dedicated to reporting on the sweeping job cuts affecting both senior and junior journalists alike, a trend is emerging for laid-off staff to use blogs, Twitter and other online sites and tools to capture their redundancy.
Reports such as Martin Gee’s set of Flickr images from his last day at the San Jose Mercury give a highly individual picture of how these cuts are being felt on a personal level beyond the redundancy figures and prediction stats.
In the summer, the Columbia Journalism Review started its ‘Parting Thoughts’ series, posting responses from journalists leaving the industry or facing redundancy.
At the Gannett Blog, former Gannett editor Jim Hopkins crowdsourced a blogpost of lay-offs by the publisher, listed by newspaper area – at time of writing redundancies at 72 of Gannett’s 85 US titles affected by the company’s latest round of job cuts were accounted for in Hopkins’ post.
In an open blog post last week, Ryan Carson, co-founder of web application design and events agency Carsonified, used the company’s blog to share his thoughts about staff cuts and give the reasons for making them.
Carson went on to give tips for companies looking to recession-proof their business (points that some commenters on the post argue are common sense no matter what the economic situation).
The Spokesman-Review has used its Daily Briefing blog to cover staff leaving in an equally personal and open way. News of senior staff exiting the paper, such as editor Steve Smith and assistant managing editor Carla Savalli, was broken on the blog and posts have also been penned by outgoing journalists, including Thuy Dzuong:
“Folks, it’s been fun but The layoff list for non-managers has been finalized, and I’m on it.”
Last week Silicon Alley Insider built a ‘real time’-style page to cover lay-offs at parent company Yahoo, updating it as new info came in.
(UPDATE – The Rocky Mountain News has launched iwantmyrocky.com to canvas support for the newspaper)
Despite the sad circumstances, the way in which journalists and media workers are facing redundancy in these examples shows a real engagement with online tools. A personal picture of what is happening to the industry is being documented for future reference by these staff members expressing themselves so openly (and perhaps significantly being ‘allowed’ to express themselves by their past/present employers).
What is more, while they may not hold the answers to the problems currently faced by the media industry, they shed light on how these issues are perceived and felt on the frontline. Something which employers should read and learn from.
Today sees the first week of Journalism.co.uk putting its new timelines and maps to use – a way of flagging up and documenting important journalism events each day.
We’ve had some good feedback via email and other blogs so far and we’d encourage you to either directly help edit them yourselves, or email us with things you’d like to see added (judith or laura at journalism.co.uk)
The idea is to keep these up-to-date with varied sources, and as frequently as necessary, so we will have built up a good resource to look back on for story research, or other purposes. You can add locations, links, video and photographs to each event.
Dipity is proving a good tool so far, although has a few problems (for example, the automated WordPress RSS feed seems to have disappeared in one of them). We’ll follow up with some more thoughts on using Dipity in the new year.
So link them, use them, and add to them if you feel so inclined. We hope you enjoy and find them useful.
Journalism industry job losses tracked here.
International journalism media freedom tracked here.
Extensive staff cuts in US newsrooms will affect the diversity of the organisations and their reporting, according to this report.
As the US’ first black president comes to power, journalists who understand diversity will be more in demand, argues Dori Maynard, president of the Maynard Institute for Journalism Education.
Matthew Bell reports that parodist Craig Brown remains in good spirits despite the Telegraph cutting his column: “Why shouldn’t they get rid of me?” Brown is quoted as saying. “I’m a freelancer; I have no loyalty to them, they have no loyalty to me.”
Silicon Alley Insider, who admit they could be included in a downsize, have this handy feature for tracking the Yahoo job cuts as they happen.
It’s a live y’hoo to Yahoo employees, as more announcments are made. It brings together blog posts, Tweets and memos in the same way they covered the AOL layoffs last year.