The NUJ in the newsThe Southport ADM has given the NUJ a strong platform to build a sustained campaign for action to resist a further assault on jobs, pay and the conditions under which we have to work. Here, Alan Gibson gives the highs and the lows of the conference and identifies some of the key issues in the coming year.
The NUJ Left will be at ADM. On the Thursday night we will be holding a public meeting at 6pm – 7.30pm, Southport Theatre and Convention Centre,
The Promenade, PR9 0DZ. So please come along to find out what we are about.
We here at the NUJ Left would like to congratulate Christine Buckley for winning the election for the post of editor of the NUJ magazine The Journalist. We wish Christine every success in the role and hope to work with her in the future to make The Journalist the best union magazine in the country.
NUJ general secretary Jeremy Dear and president James Doherty have appealed for more funds to help the Leeds strikers.
The appeal recognises the importance of the dispute at the Johnston Press-owned Yorkshire Post and Yorkshire Evening Post.
NUJ Left is backing today’s call by the chapel at the Johnston-owned Halifax Courier for a national strike to fight the cuts in local media.
The members in Yorkshire have written to general secretary Jeremy Dear, and their colleagues in the Johnston group chapel, to demand the union organises what would be the first national strike in provincial newspapers for 30 years.
Motion passed at the March meeting of NUJ press and PR branch:
‘This branch welcomes the march for jobs, justice and climate to be held in London on Saturday 28 March 2009 at the time of the G20, organised by the TUC, trade unions, and a wide range of NGOs, religious and other campaigning pressure groups.
The branch further notes the appalling rise in redundancies and unemployment both within our own industry and across the wider economy as a result on the continuing and worsening economic crisis, with even official unemployment figures expected to exceed three million by the end of the year.
The latest announcements by Guardian Media Group that it plans to make half its journalists in the Manchester area redundant and sack 95 workers in Surrey and Berkshire, are shameful and should be condemned by everyone on the left.
By Jane Aitchison, PCS DWP group president
The strikes by our comrades in the NUJ at the Yorkshire Post and Evening Post are as important as they are inspirational.
What the last few weeks have demonstrated, with no room for doubt or misrepresentation, is how highly regarded by the people of Leeds the journalists on these papers are.
Interesting to read Trinity Mirror chief executive bigging up the importance of local newspapers in Media Guardian.
Marvel at the concern for civic life dripping from her utterances that “this is about who turns up to the local courts each morning. Who is it who are holding the councils to account, where is that planning application being properly debated? Local newspapers and we absolutely believe in them.”
NUJ Left activist and protest photographer Marc Vallee has spent the last three months investigating police surveillance of journalists and protesters with the Guardian’s Paul Lewis.
This is what they found out. The video footage shows a terrifying lack of understanding of the role of the press in documenting protest, particularly considering the massive abuse of power that is taking place as their words are spoken.