Fairfax scales back redundancies to production, lifestyle and photographic
Fairfax Media has announced new proposals regarding redundancies which would see the publisher scale back the number of redundancies by 18 full time staff, to between 50-60 full time positions, as the voluntary redundancy program opens today.
Last month the company announced a new round of cuts to its newspaper arm Australian Publishing Media (APM), across its editorial production, lifestyle and photographic sections that would have seen 70-80 staff lose their posts.
The cuts, which included major changes to the photographic desks of The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age with the outsourcing of much of its photographic capacity to Getty Images, led to mass walkouts across Fairfax’s major mastheads.
In an email to staff today managing director of APM Allen Williams confirmed the number of proposed redundancies would be reduced by eight in both photograph and production, while lifestyle section life media would keep an additional two staff.
In total more than 50 positions are still expected to be made redundant although the company also signalled that it would seek create a limited number of new roles including two “quality manager” roles. The changes come following frank consultations with the Media Entertainment and Arts Alliance (MEAA), the union representing journalists, which have seen them push the publisher on the details of the plans and in particular how photographic and subediting would be outsourced.
In the email to staff Allen Williams, managing director of APM wrote: “The company reviewed and carefully considered all suggestions and alternatives presented by staff and the union nominated working groups throughout the consultation period.”
The program for voluntary redundancies opens from today and runs until June 13.
The house committees of The Age and Sydney Morning Herald are meeting this morning to discuss the union’s response.
Nic Christensen
Full email to staff below:
Why, oh why do they keep up this train of woe?
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Allen Williams has just got started.
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Isn’t it about time the board started looking at Mr Hywood? His only strategy in recent times is bringing in an axe swinging rural press guy Allen Williams to ruthlessly carve up the place. Jack Mathews launched digital subscriptions and subsequently got the boot by Mr Hywood.
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They need to cull the tiers of management, who fly business, claim enormous expenses and never pull up their sleeves. Get rid of them and empower smart people who understand how to run a well oiled, lean startup style company – the profits will trickle back I tell ya… or will they? Why bother all the effort and hard work, re-establishing the mammoth, when smart folk can do their own thang. Interesting times.
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Alan Williams is just doing what he’s told –to cut costs. But when will we hear something meaningful from Fairfax about what they’re doing to address the other side of the P&L equation – revenues? With print revenues falling off a cliff, they have to cut costs. They’re no different to any other newspaper business in that respect. But they also have to come up with ways to try and replace that lost print revenue – or at least some of it. Hywood has spoken about some of these new revenue streams — when will we see any of them starting to make an impact on the balance sheet? News Corp are going through the same pain in their newspaper division — difference is they have other highly profitable businesses (REA, FOxSports, Foxtel etc) to plug the gap. Fairfax don’t (with possible exception of Domain)
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