‘No Journos. No News’ campaign launched
No Journos. No News. is a public campaign
launched by the Media, Entertainment & Arts Alliance in response to
wide-ranging redundancies taking place at News Limited. So far in 2009, News
Limited has removed at least 106 journalists from its newspaper businesses across
the country.
Redundancies around the country so
far include: 16 jobs at The Mercury
in Hobart, 17 at the Gold Coast Bulletin,
eight at The Advertiser in Adelaide
and Brisbane’s Sunday Mail, seven at The Courier-Mail in Brisbane, three at
the Gold Coast Sun and two each at theHerald Sun in Melbourne, the Northern Territory News and The Cairns Post. In addition, up to 15
jobs have gone on Cumberland
community newspapers in NSW. Meanwhile the national broadsheet paper The Australian has cut 21 jobs from
newsrooms around Australia
including half of its team of photographers.
There are expectations that more
journalists could lose their jobs in coming weeks: “News Limited’s ‘National
Features Initiative’, which was announced in March, will inevitably lead to job
losses in production, meaning that local knowledge built over decades of
experience in each city will disappear,” says the Media Alliance federal
secretary Christopher Warren. “There may be cost efficiencies, but these will
be paid for by the public. Readers want their newspapers to be produced by journalists
with a stake in the community which they serve. This initiative puts that
important bond at risk.
“The redundancies across News Limited
newspapers are a backward step,” Warren
says. “Among the people who have been removed are award-winning reporters,
section editors, photographers, graphic designers, sub-editors with decades of
experience.
“In the past two years in the US and Britain it’s been demonstrated that
culling journalists doesn’t save newspapers, it only erodes them from the
inside - sometimes terminally. Take away the journalists and the quality of
journalism produced by that newspaper must surely decline and the readers have
less reason to read the paper,” Warren
says. “It comes down to a simple equation: no journos = no News.”
An interactive Redundancy Map
available on this campaign website is one of the
features where the public can track the redundancies at News Limited mastheads
across Australia.
Visitors to the site can submit tributes for News journalists made redundant
and stay up to date with the latest moves by the company.
Many of those journalists targeted
for redundancy were on old-hat, Howard-era individual contracts. These offer
next to nothing as a redundancy package compared to the collective agreement
negotiated by the Media Alliance which recognises journalists’ years of loyalty
to their mastheads. The Media Alliance is encouraging News Limited staff on
AWAs to switch to the collective agreement in order to legally guarantee their
entitlements should they be made redundant.