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Latest Press Release Just received at Ward Lovett!
Monday, 27 July 2009
Months ago we talked about the media frenzy around doom and gloom of the credit crunch and then the recession. Every news channel and newspaper vied for the ultimate doom and gloom story and it absolutely frightened the business sectors into not spending on their marketing for quarter 1 2009 and certainly told the public reduce spend in the retail and leisure sectors.
The immediate effect was that the media owners have seen their advertising revenues decimated and reacted with the wholesale redundancy programmes of their sales teams. Still editorial teams did not see that they were partly responsible for the sharp decline in spends hiding behind their moral duty to report and ploughed on with their purge.
Press was in decline way before the financial meltdown and online was always going to grow. However this negative coverage certainly accelerated the decline and as we hopefully emerge from the recession it is proving highly difficult to persuade clients to return to traditional advertising methods.
I believe both paid and free titles have an important part in maintaining our regional news networks. The problem is that they need to be profitable and this currently comes from advertising spend, the very people the editorial teams frightened into change.
It our job to educate regional clients that if they don’t have regional media platforms, then the net result is it will inevitably become extremely expensive for them to reach the public in the future. This is proving really difficult.
Anyway finally the proverbial penny has dropped with the editorial teams as the media owners move to close unprofitable titles and streamline their businesses for the post recession arena. This places the editorial teams potentially into the same redundancy programmes as their advertising sales counterparts found themselves 6 months ago.
Popular opinion is that the major players like BBC and the FT will dominate the online market and there will not be the opportunity for smaller players to enter the market.
This of course means there is not the need for the numbers of journalists that the newspapers networks have carried over the years. In short there is no opportunity to jump ship for many of these editorial guys. We do now run the risk of losing a lot of this talent but then some would argue they have brought it on themselves.
I would think there is many an advertising sales person resisting a smug smile this morning as they look at their chunky redundancy cheques and question whether their opposite numbers from editorial will get the same deal.
Anyway here is the press release:
Journalists at The Birmingham Post and its sister titles are planning a one-day strike on Thursday because there is no guarantee compulsory redundancies will not be made among editorial staff.
Trinity Mirror Midlands, the company which owns The Birmingham Post and The Birmingham Mail, last month announced it was closing a series of weekly titles including the Walsall Observer and the Tamworth Times with the loss of 94 jobs across the company.
Neil Elkes, joint NUJ father of chapel for the Birmingham-based titles, said: "We are opposed to the closure of newspaper titles and branch offices as we believe this will damage the business in the Midlands. But we are taking industrial action as a last resort in a bid to prevent compulsory redundancies among our members, particularly a number of trainee journalists whose careers are just beginning. We will review the action if there are no compulsory redundancies."
Bosses at the company have branded the decision "reckless and negligent".
Trinity Mirror Regionals managing director Georgina Harvey said: "It is highly frustrating that the majority of our journalists should be held to ransom like this when only 27 per cent of our entire editorial workforce across the Midlands businesses voted for this action. We are fighting to secure the future of our businesses in the Midlands which are now running at a loss, and this will not benefit the NUJ or their members in any way whatsoever."
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