Journalists in Sheffield and Scarborough who work for Johnston Press are balloting for action over a new content management system that threatens jobs and standards in local journalism.
In Sheffield, the introduction of the system has seen reporters, feature writers and newsdesk staff grapple with producing most of the pages with practically no training, while page editors have watched their workload dwindle as they now handle only 20 per cent of pages.
In addition, the company is moving towards a centralised production hub based in Sheffield for North Derbyshire and South Yorkshire. Fears that this may be widened to the whole of Yorkshire were strengthened when the company announced that the work of production journalists in Scarborough was being moved to Sheffield – a journey of 100 miles which would take two hours by car.
Staff who don’t go can either redeploy to fill reporting vacancies (some of which are done by staff on short-term contracts or take severance.
The Sheffield Star is also moving to overnight printing from 26 March, which further hits news and sports coverage and means staff are being asked to voluntarily cover late shifts including Sunday nights. Talks with management are ongoing about this.
Sheffield MoC Julia Armstrong said: “Morale here has plummeted but anger has risen with each announcement, which leads us to believe our management in Edinburgh have lost the plot. All of this has caused our members an incredible amount of stress and worry, both for their jobs and for the state of the coverage we can offer our readers. Overnight printing means we may well not be able to report the result of the general election in the next day’s paper.
“We urge all other JP chapels who are facing similar attacks to ballot now as joint action is the only effective way forward. Our colleagues in Blackpool have already led the way with a magnificent vote.”
The ballot result should be due on 8 April.
To send messages of support to Sheffield, email saveourstar@hotmail.co.uk
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Tags: job cuts, Johnston Press, technology
This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 23rd, 2010 at 7:22pm and is filed under job cuts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.Both comments and pings are currently closed.