Up to 120 jobs go at News Corp as NSW and Victorian contact centres close and The Oz makes redundancies
Up to 120 News Corp jobs across Victorian and NSW contact centres will be axed from July, after plans to consolidate operations were announced to staff yesterday, Mumbrella understands.
News Limited has confirmed it will close its NSW and Victorian contact centres and move all operations to Adelaide. The changes will affect call centre staff and advertising account managers.
Mumbrella understands the redundancies are running across metropolitan, local and regional publications including Melbourne’s Herald Sun, Leader Newspaper, Geelong Advertiser and Weekly Times.
As part of the move, some staff will be redeployed through the business, however redundancies are set to occur.
Mumbrella understands Births and Death Notices for these papers will be moved to Adelaide.
In the latest series of redundancies, Mumbrella also understands several editorial members have taken voluntary redundancies at The Australian, although a News Corp spokesperson declined to confirm the exact number. The Guardian today reports it as six.
The latest set of redundancies comes after News Corp Australia announced its plans to make $40m in cuts to its Australian operations.
In May this year, News Corp axed as many as 70 staff photographers from its mastheads, along with production staff.
The news also follows Fairfax this week cutting almost half of its national digital video team along with long serving editorial staff, as part of its voluntary redundancy program to save $30m.
A spokesperson for News Corp told Mumbrella: “We are consolidating our resources to create a centre of excellence in South Australia.”
News Corp declined to comment on the number of redundancies at the contact centres, however, confirmed there had been a small amount of voluntary redundancies at The Australian in recent days.
You do realise those jobs are moving to Adelaide?
Working across the road at Mince Meat & Bacon, a store specialising in Mince Meat & Bacon, we’ve noticed a lot of people coming in requesting Mince Meat or Bacon products are wearing Advertiser badges.
Here at Mince meat & Bacon, we have grown to know many of our Mince Meat & Bacon customers, but now its getting hard to remember all the Mince Meat & Bacon clients due to the new level of people coming through.
Quite often we’ll think, “hey, this is a Mince Meat person”, so our Mince Meat & Bacon salesperson will prepare their Mince Meat for them. But it ends up been a new Mince Meat & Bacon Customer that wants our Bacon.
We here at Mince Meat & Bacon will try get the actual number of new jobs been created at the Waymouth Street Building, because it’ll also help us here at Mince Meat & Bacon to serve our customers better.
Thanks,
Tony “Mince Meat & Bacon” Smithers-Warfoldjones
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Up to 120 News Corp jobs across Victorian and NSW contact centres will be axed from July… Tragic..
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@Tony “Mince Meat & Bacon” Smithers-Warfoldjones,
It’s Stardust Veniyal here, from BeeVeGan just next to your Mince Meat & Bacon store.
I know that in the past, BeeVeGan and Mince Meat & Bacon have had our issues with each other, most my customers wont even come to my Waymouth Street store because we share a wall with a store specialising in Mince Meat & Bacon.
But I have to agree with you, I have definitely seen an increase in our customer base in the last two weeks, many new faces of which are wearing Advertiser Badges.
Our customer base has doubled in two weeks! And 3 of those 4 new BeeVeGan customers all had Advertiser Badges. One of them was actually looking for your store, so I cant really count them.
I hope they enjoyed eating murder.
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Huh?
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Good onya Adelaide! Commiserations to Vic and NSW.
At least they didn’t outsource the contact centres to Mumbai.
Buzz words: “Consolidation of resources” and “Centre of excellence” sound positive I guess?
… Makes me think of Mr Burns from The Simpsons… the “Charles Montgomery Burns award for Outstanding Achievement in the field of Excellence.”
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Ok so with no call centre staff, will there now be an option to cancel my Australian subscription online, without having to call and wait for 30 mins to speak with a human to press a button?
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I’m really worried this will effect the quality Journalism we expect from News Corp and we will be left with bloggers writing opinion pieces and tid bits of IPA/LNP propaganda.
Oh wait!….
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