No Journos No News Campaign launched

Date: 24 July 2009

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 at News Limited's local and metropolitan mastheads are putting a huge amount of pressure on remaining staff to keep their communities properly informed. Readers will have to become used to a more homogenised news service and less in-depth investigation and analysis of local issues.

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.

For further information

Union:	MEAA
Phone:	02 9333 0999
Email:	online@alliance.org.au
WWW:	http://www.nojournos.org.au

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