Alan Formby-Jackson

From media.guardian.co.uk

The Financial Times plans to cut 10% of its 500-strong editorial staff as it merges its online and newsprint operations into a single multimedia operation.

The restructure - that will interweave online and print reporting, editing, and production - could result in around 50 redundancies, the paper said today.

The job losses will be mainly in production, as the reporting operation was integrated several years ago.

The FT has entered into a 30-day consultation period with the National Union of Journalists, saying it “aimed in particular at keeping redundancies to a minimum”.

A voluntary redundancy programme was “part of the consultation process”, the paper said.

However, the Financial Times editor, Lionel Barber, said in a memo to staff that compulsory redundancies were an option if the voluntary redundancy programme was not successful.

“We start from a position of strength as a market-leading international newspaper with a highly respected website and other emerging online channels,” he said.

“The FT has long been a pioneer in forging an integrated online and print newsroom, with web-first publishing and a unified editorial department. Now we must take the next step.”

The Financial Times, which is available in 23 countries, said its “new newsroom” project to restructure its editorial operations would create one of the most integrated multimedia newsrooms in the world.

The newspaper and website newsdesks will merge into a single newsdesk and fewer changes will be made between the paper’s different geographic editions in Europe, America and Asia.

Subeditors will use the Methode editorial production system, installed over the past year, to publish web and print pages off the same platform.

The Financial Times is part of the Pearson group, the world’s largest educational publisher and owner of Penguin books, which has long denied plans to sell the paper.

The Pearson chief executive, Marjorie Scardino, recently appointed Rhona Fairhead, former Pearson finance director, as chief executive of the FT Group - which also owns International Data Corporation, a business analysis company, and a a 50% stake in the Economist.

The National Union of Journalists expressed “deep concern” over the scale of redundancies at the FT and said it would oppose any compulsory job losses.

“This is a consultation on a fait accompli rather than a proper consultation with the union,” said the NUJ general secretary, Jeremy Dear.

“We would oppose any compulsory redundancies and urge managers at the FT to find an alternative course for the development of new ways of working at the paper to eliminate this threat.

“In the light of recent job losses and an ongoing recruitment freeze, we are also concerned that quality may suffer. You cannot keep cutting staff and not see an impact on the product - or on stress levels among already overstretched staff.”

http://media.guardian.co.uk/presspublishing/story/0,,1817959,00.html

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 12th, 2006 at 3:22 pm and is filed under Newspapers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.