News Corp Australia has tasked editors with putting forward editorial jobs for redundancy as part of a global move to cut costs.
On Monday, unionised News Corp staff were told in an email that management had refused to negotiate with the Media, Entertainment & Arts Alliance (MEAA) for a “fair redundancy” process, after indicating that editors will start making calls on between 30 to 40 editorial redundancies.
News Corp editors are in the final stages of deciding who will be shown the door, Crikey understands, as staff mull voluntary redundancies.
Up to 40 jobs are expected to go as part of a push to cut up to 200 people from across the local business, after a 30% earnings dip last month prompted News Corp chief executive Robert Thomson to announce a 5% headcount reduction.
“It’s not something you want to do, but it’s something you have to do in these circumstances to build on what is [a] robust platform,” he told a Morgan Stanley conference earlier this month.
News Corp’s local operation — which includes The Australian, The Daily Telegraph, the Herald Sun, news.com.au and Sky News — employs more than 8000 people across Australia.
The company’s global cost-cutting drive is understood to put more than 1200 employees on the line around the world, with up to 200 set to go in Australia, mainly across The Australian and the company’s Sydney and Melbourne tabloids.
“Obviously, a surge in interest rates and acute inflation had a tangible impact on all of our businesses,” Thomson said while presenting News Corp’s second-quarter earning results.
“But we believe these challenges are more ephemeral than eternal. Just as our company passed the stress-test of the pandemic with record profits, the initiatives now under way — including an expected 5% headcount reduction, or around 1250 positions this calendar year — will create a robust platform for future growth.”
Cuts to editorial jobs at News Corp Australia come as other media companies try to hem expenses heading into the second financial quarter, with a view to square away all redundancies and cost-cutting activities before the end of the financial year.
In Western Australia, Australian Community Media announced it would shutter four major regional news outlets across the state’s southwest, including the Mandurah Mail, the Augusta-Margaret River Mail, the Bunbury Mail, and the Busselton-Dunsborough Mail.
The mastheads will stop publishing at the end of April, according to a letter sent to staff this week, unless the company is able to find a buyer. If not, the mastheads — and the jobs that come with them — would be heavily consolidated, if not folded altogether.
“ACM has had no choice but to consider options in the face of a number of challenges faced by the company and the media industry more broadly, which have been exacerbated by the 80% increase to newsprint costs, which are well publicised,” it read.
MEAA WA director Tiffany Venning told the ABC the information gap left by the newspapers was a concerning matter for residents living outside of metropolitan areas across the state, and “just a really sad situation” for the communities they cover.
So, after raking in record pandemic profits, they’re cutting staff to ensure continued growth.
…spoken like a true cultural tumour.
Just so long as Nine and the ABC don’t start recruiting more Murdoctrinated hacks like Nine did with Crowe.
And ABC did with Speers.
Got a wedding to pay for guys.
Not just the wedding, got to put some aside for the pre-nup.
Honestly don’t have even have an atom worth of sympathy for this lot!
Perhaps the public could be invited to nominate those to be made redundant. I’d nominate Sky News as an opening bid.
yeah! Me too.
And everyone in the Australian with a picture of themselves alongside their article.
Suspect with just Bolt and Kenny’s salaries you could save 10-15 jobs of actual journalists.
Is there that many journalists actually working there?
Not real ones, but plenty of Toe the News Corpse Line variety. G&S “he’s got them on a list, they’ll none of them be missed”
My nomination for first out the door is Greg Sheridan.
Ah Sheridan, yes Dolt or Dufus? Or both? Or just menace? Protector of Mother Church, the American Alliance and former apologist for state run massacres. A man specialising in the banal and the cliched whose megaphone is never big enough to take away his aggrieved sense of being cancelled. Like Bolt, he could be easily replaced by Chat GP and it would likely be wider ranging and more original in the content it produced.
Sheridan’s overt fawning on neo-con militarists of the Dubya administration and pro-US “strongmen” around the planet would be pretty hard to replicate, though.
“Would be pretty hard to replicate though”, making it an extra reason coupled with his inability to see and acknowledge when the Catholic Church has been mired in paedophilia and moving offending priests from parish to parish in the effort to keep it covered up.
Make it a wide door to get Bolt AND Sheridan out together, though if given a choice, I think I’d like to see Andrew Bolt, Peta Credlin Chris Kenny and Paul Murray go ASAP if not before. Plenty more to choose from, but as an Oz journalist appearing on panel discussions, Greg Sheridan is number 1.
Definitely Peta
Nothing to add to society
I’m sure she appeals to a very specific demographic but it would be best not to elaborate on why.