Words Dept.: entry

It’s come to something when a regional newspaper group thinks it makes business sense to close eight local offices and force what’s left of its depleted journalistic staff base to either work from home or commute miles into the city centre to get to their own newsroom. The idea of long-established local beat journalists fulfilling the basic requirements of their job from suburban back bedrooms or an office ten miles away doesn’t seem to have been properly thought through.

We’re used to this kind of short-sighted cost-cutting when it comes from people who know nothing about newspapers (like Richard Desmond). But when it involves a media company owned by the Guardian Media Group, it’s all the more shocking.

MEN Media, which publishes the Manchester Evening News and has a near monopoly on the local weekly newspaper sector around Greater Manchester, announced today that it will be making 78 journalists redundant across 23 titles, apparently half from the local weeklies and half from the Manchester Evening News itself. Many are expected to be compulsory redundancies. I’m not especially au fait with the inner workings of the MEN but the scale of these cuts seems to have come as a major surprise.

Mark Dodson, chief executive of GMG Regional Media, says:

MEN Media’s role is to produce great journalism for our readers, users and viewers in Greater Manchester. If we want to continue to be able to do this, we need to find a new, sustainable, lower-cost business model to support it. The economic viability of local and regional newspapers is under very real and imminent threat.

But the NUJ is already making noises about how this might play with the Guardian’s famously liberal readership. General Secretary Jeremy Dear says:

Journalists in Manchester have been stunned by this announcement, which runs directly against the [GMG's] Living Our Values campaign and the liberal values of the Scott Trust.

These cuts show a total contempt for readers, advertisers, and the people left behind to do more work with no resources. The union will support our members in Manchester to resists these cuts in any way we can. I’m confident that Guardian readers will not sit idly by while the management ride roughshod over the company’s traditions.

I don’t expect we’ve heard the end of this. For the time being, it’s perhaps worth reflecting on an extremely sad day for journalists on papers like the MEN, Rochdale Observer and Macclesfield Express, and for anyone who cares even slightly about the long-established principles of local news journalism.