Journalists experiencing an end of financial year clear out
Chris Warren
More than 200 journalists have departed Australian media companies in the last six months, according to estimates by the Media Entertainment and Arts Alliance (MEAA), the union which represents journalists. The most recent round of redundancies follows the tsunami of lay offs, sparked by restructures at Fairfax and News Limited this time last year which saw the axing of an estimated 1,000 to 1,200 jobs across the sector.
Chris Warren, the federal secretary of the MEAA, has accused major media outlets of an, “end of financial year clean out”.
Warren told Encore that publishers and broadcasters are being driven by a need to ensure budgets are in order for the new financial year.
“There is a bit of an end of year financial year clear out on at the moment. There have been cuts at Bauer, the Illawarra Mercury, News Limited, Fox Sports and Sky News which are driven by the need to get these costs onto the books by the end of the financial year,” he said.
Several media outlets including News Limited declined to respond to Warren’s remarks however a spokesman for Fairfax Media labelled the comments “callous”.
The spokesman said: “It’s a callous line from the unions – we are talking about people and their jobs.”
However Warren has thrown the ball back to Fairfax saying: “They think it’s callous huh? I’m not the one sacking journalists.”
Steve Allen, media analyst at Fusion Strategy, said immediate budget pressures were not the only factor behind the cuts as the Standard Media Index shows significant falls in advertising revenue, particularly for print and magazines.
“The SMI data keeps reporting the continuation of around 20 per cent declines in advertising revenue,” he said. According to most recent SMI figures from May, revenues have fallen 25 per cent for newspapers while magazines saw a fall of 17.7 per cent in 2012-13.
Allen said: “They just have to change their cost base. There is no choice if they are to stay afloat. There is a need to increase efficiency because the revenue from print advertising is in decline.”
While Warren concedes immediate budget pressures are not the only driver for the recent redundancies, he hopes media owners will cease the run of axings in the new financial year.
“I think we are coming to a hiatus and yes we’ll have these jobs go now but then the companies will hopefully try and set themselves up for the new financial year,” said Warren.
“The next challenge, if there is one, will be for the media companies to assess how they’re going in the new financial year.”
Although a large number of journalism jobs have been lost in the last 12 months, Warren says there are positive signs of growth in the new media and not-for-profit sectors.
Citing the success of US start-ups such as Buzzfeed and Mashable, he said: “Broadly, we are seeing growth of not-for-profit business and a couple of new ventures in Australia. The Global Mail, The Guardian and The Conversation are examples of that.”
“There are positive signs for the future new media landscape. The problem at the moment is that none of that replaces the jobs that have already been lost.”
Fusion Strategy’s Allen agrees. “Is digital going to be the saviour? Not the slightest chance,” he said. “Is it going to relieve some of the pressure and reuse some of these quality journalists? Unquestionably.”
Nic Christensen
This story first appeared in the weekly edition of Encore available for iPad and Android tablets. Visit encore.com.au for a preview of the app or click below to download.
Tell me about it. I got canned nine months ago and still haven’t found anything other than a bit of subbing work on the side. Hey, I appreciate times have changed and I’ve gone from being a print person and retrained into digital. I’ve paid for the retraining out of my own pocket. You invest all this money for nothing. It’s a dire career and I’d advise any youngster contemplating it to give it a wide berth. Unless you’re happy making $35K working for some shoe website no one reads….
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I love the way these union guys work. How many forums did they run bagging news media and how much crap did they promote through their dodgy awards? Hopefully they will be the first to go broke. Its a big job trying to find a single case in which they made a useful contribution.
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What we’re seeing with this situation is just the latest couple of nails being hammered into the coffin of the traditional media. The days of big news rooms, filled with lots of full time, salaried journalists are over. And the new media will be run along much leaner and meaner lines from a staffing viewpoint with a lot more outsourcing to private freelancers. But, I agree entirely with the view that it’s actually a very exciting time to be in the media.
Older journalists have to (and, indeed, should be keen to) acquire a much broader range of skills such as video making and blogging as the boundaries between print, audio visual / broadcast / social media are crumbling and everything is blending into one. Those who are either unable or not interested in freshening up their skills base and becoming more independent from an employment viewpoint will simply be washed away in the tidal wave of change. It will be a case of adapt or perish. We live in a sound grab world nowadays whether we like it or not.
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I would suggest that ‘Ex reader” has not looked too hard at the media industry and is making judgments based on what newspaper managements do and not what others are trying to do. There is far more going on than just the decline of newspapers.
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Lindsay
Would you care to elaborate ? Interested in what you’ve got to say. Free to air television and traditional news publishers have been the main victims so far. But I suspect that even radio won’t go untouched – certainly not music radio. I no longer listen to any local stations over here. Broadcasters in Ireland and Southern California provide my listening enjoyment these days.
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http://m.seek.com.au/job/24757.....JMC-000032
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Bruce, you make what I would think are valid criticism of sections of the media. But the Media and Entertainment and Art Alliance does not control the media companies. Nor do those companies employ all of the people involved in journalism. Nor is the union only interested in journalists who only work in news. The world is far more complex than that. However the newspaper industry has been busy shedding readers for over 40 years. The arrival of the Internet has been give credit for the loss, but the reality is newspapers lost the plot many years before people acquired computers to entertain themselves.
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