Newsroom blues

By Graeme Whitfield on Jul 14, 09 11:04 AM

I didn't think I'd be writing about job losses in our newsroom quite so quickly after the last round of redundancies.

Having only re-organised in January - merging The Journal, Evening Chronicle and Sunday Sun into joint newsgathering and production teams - people were a bit shocked last week when the company asked for more volunteers.

Last time round, we were asked to do more with less and that seemed a big ask. At least time we're being asked to do less with less, but that does mean a few titles closing.

There's no doubt that newspaper companies are suffering really badly in the current climate. Circulations were falling well before the recession and now advertising revenues are following.

There's no doubt either that the future of newspapers and the media in general will involve smaller numbers of employees. But the immediate impact within the newsroom is that we're all thinking: "We're already down to the bare bones - how can they cut more people?"

One of the problems, I think, is that we're still trying to be an old fashioned newspaper publisher, putting out two titles six days a week and trying to make them papers of record. We still have an audience for that, and most of our revenue comes from them.

It isn't possible to just become a slick, web-first 21st century media company overnight and we're in a pretty painful transition phase.

I hope we come out the other side and I believe we will, though there are times when I worry when we might not. Newspapers bigger that The Journal have closed in the US recently, some anything's possible...

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