News Corp Australia is sacking the majority of their photgraphers and subeditors in an effort to cut costs and ensure that the newspaper business stays afloat. The attitude here as stated by Campbell Reid, the director of editorial management, is 'preserve in print and excel in digital.' Among some of the publications losing staff are the Daily Telegraph, the Herald Sun and Courier-Mail. This comes after a move to cut costs in December with 42 journalists, artists and photographers losing their jobs to cut $40m from the costs of News Corp. The corporation has said that the old model of staff that once existed would be replaced by a 'hybrid model, consisting of a core tram of photographic specialists, complemented by freelance and agency talent.' Even with such a radical move though, during a company meeting no mention was made whatsoever of the financial losses actually driving the new model. Something that News Corp plans to implement with all this said is a $60m content management system called Methode. This allows journalists to 'edit, lay out and publish their own stories,' removing the need for staff like subeditors and production journalists.
- The announcement follows a cost-cutting drive in December which saw 42 journalists, artists and photographers made redundant in a bid to slash $40m from News Corp
- In February News Corp posted a second-quarter loss of $287m and cited impairments in the Australian newspaper business as a key factor
The death of the print platform is just something that we'll continue and continue to see in the future. Just last week, Fairfax Media too announced cuts that'll cause dozens of journalists and photographers to lose their jobs to help shave off $30m from the annual editorial budget. While these moves will help the corporations that undertake them to stay afloat, something we can expect at least to some level is reductions in the quality of the media we're getting. 'Editorial talent' is something that'll be a lot more difficult to display which could potentially detract from a key pillar of news itself.
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