Redundancies at Central Counties Newspapers spark workload fearsStaff at Johnston Press Central Counties Newspapers’ titles, including the Banbury Guardian are having to absorb the extra work created by a devastating round of redundancies that has affected reporters and photographers at every site. Staff at Johnston Press Central Counties Newspapers’ titles, including the Banbury Guardian are having to absorb the extra work created by a devastating round of redundancies that has affected reporters and photographers at every site.
The company has axed four of the eleven photographers serving the division’s centres at Banbury, Leamington Spa, Rugby, Daventry, Aylesbury, Buckingham and Hemel Hempstead, reorganising the remaining staff into ‘hubs’ serving more than one centre.
It has also got rid of all the editorial assistants whose job it had been to cover the village news and entertainments as well archiving and other administrative tasks.
Staff are deeply concerned about what all this will mean for their workloads. Photographers will now have to cover vastly larger patches. Daventry, Rugby and Leamington Spa, for instance, will share the use of four photographers, covering an area stretching from near Northampton to Stratford on Avon. The Banbury Guardian will share photographers with the Buckingham Advertiser, covering a patch from Shipston-on-Stour to Aylesbury.
They are worried too that they will end up being forced to increase their weekend working from every fortnight to three out of four weekends.
The implications for reporting staff are just as worrying. Kirsty Edmonds, who retains her job as photographer at the Banbury Guardian, says that the paper had two editorial assistants to cover village news when she first started a few years ago, “and they spent the best part of Monday and Tuesday on it.” Now that all assistant posts have been axed, she estimates that a reporter will need to spend up to three clear days to cover the work – in addition to doing their own job.
FINANCIAL PRESSURES
The redundancies come in response to financial pressures that the company attributes primarily to a downturn in advertising. Last May Johnston Press was forced to seek and emergency cash injection of £212 million through a rights issue. The rescue package saw the Johnston family lose its status as the largest shareholder as it was forced to sell more than half of its 19.5% holding. That position is now taken by the Malaysian billionaire Ananda Krishnan.
But Edmonds, who along with the other photographers went through the bruising experience of having to reapply for her own job, says that jobs could have been saved had the company agreed to look at some of the suggestions she and other staff came up with for increasing revenue.
One idea was to create a digital archive. “All our negs are in storage, and I thought maybe we could get them out and develop a historical site.
“I get asked weekly about whether we could get hold of a picture, for instance, of someone who appeared in the [Banbury] Guardian in 1972, and the answer is always no. I thought that would be a good way to use our archives and bring in some revenue.”
Edmonds also suggested finding ways for photographers to bring in extra revenue. “When I’m on a job I get asked to do a lot of freelancing, and I have to say no, because I’m quite busy.
“Why can’t we get more of a commercial role for one of our photographers to make it more lucrative and hopefully stave off some of these redundancies?
“We could go to jobs we wouldn’t normally, just for the photo sales side of things. We already have a photo sales site. It would just be a case of going more places and handing out cards saying look here are the photos of this event.”
Sadly, it seems no one was listening. “I don’t know if I misunderstood the concept of what a consultation period was… I thought it was a period to bring forward different ways that we could try to be more lucrative for the company.
“But I think they had already made up their minds. I was talking to a black hole. It seemed like the only people interested in being proactive in the situation was us.”
The question now is whether the company intends to rely on the remaining staff to work extra hours and weekends in order to get the titles out without a marked loss of quality.
If so, it may find that staff have their own ideas about that as well. AW 2008-07-02
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