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 Post subject: Job cuts in New Zealand
PostPosted: Mon Apr 16, 2007 2:32 am 
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Joined: Wed Oct 08, 2003 12:01 am
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Location: Homebush NSW Australia
My former colleague Simon Collins summarises the state of play.


Dear Paul and members of testycopyeditors.org

As you know, Tony O’Reilly’s publications in NZ and Ireland have been chosen for an experiment in contracting out subediting of live news pages on national daily newspapers which has never been tried anywhere else. For the NZ Herald, a morning paper with by far New Zealand’s biggest daily circulation of just over 200,000, the proposal is to reduce subediting jobs from 42 to 12, keeping mostly design-heavy roles including subbing the colour magazine inserts Canvas (Saturday), Viva (Wednesday) and Time Out (Thursday). All other subbing, including copy-editing of all pages except page 1, will be farmed out to the AAP subsidiary Pagemasters, which will open an Auckland operation, expected to be in the Herald’s printing plant in the suburb of Ellerslie (the Herald’s own editorial operation will stay in its current building in the city centre). Similar changes will cut about 40 subbing jobs in total from the Herald on Sunday, the community paper The Aucklander, the once-revered national magazine the NZ Listener, and regional afternoon dailies the Northern Advocate (Whangarei), Bay of Plenty Times (Tauranga), Daily Post (Rotorua) and Hawke’s Bay Today (Hastings). Other, smaller APN (O’Reilly) papers which are not using the Cybergraphics production system will keep their own subbing in the meantime, but will join eventually if the experiment is judged a success. Pagemasters CEO Bruce Davidson told us on Friday that he expects to employ about 50 subs for the Auckland operation, working on shifts from 5am to 1am. Subs will start work on the regional papers at 5am, shift to perhaps the Listener or Aucklander or early pages of the Herald or Herald on Sunday around the middle of the day, and then sub the live pages of the Herald in the evenings. Although Davidson did not say so, we presume the system is designed to save money in two ways: first, by ensuring a constant flow of pages for subs so that they never have any “down time” after getting an edition away; and second, by cutting subs’ wages and conditions. On this latter point, Davidson assured us that he would pay “market rates” for subs. He may well have to offer attractive salaries to get the experienced subs that he will need, at least at first, but we would be surprised if he intends to match conditions in our current collective agreement such as penalty rates for nights and weekends and accumulating unused sick leave to 150 days. If this deal goes ahead, we will, however, do everything we can to achieve a collective agreement at Pagemasters that is at least a good as we have at the Herald.
This proposal is driven by two big factors affecting all of us in the newspaper business: first, the loss of both readers and classified advertising to rival websites such as the wildly successful NZ auction site TradeMe, bought by Fairfax about a year ago; and second, the transfer of newspaper ownership from locally-based family businesses into the hands of multinational corporates. This latter trend has advanced further in NZ than possibly anywhere else, as all but one of our dailies (the exception is Dunedin’s Otago Daily Times) are now fully or partly owned by either Australian Provincial Newspapers (Tony O’Reilly) or Fairfax. O’Reilly, as you’d expect for someone who paid himself the highest executive salary in the world when he was CEO of Heinz, has also proved to be a particularly greedy owner who appears to be single-mindedly focused on extracting ever more profit from the newspapers he owns, regardless of the effect on the quality of the publications, let alone any considerations of loyalty to the staff who have often devoted their lives to those publications since long before he acquired them. APN has had a corporate goal of achieving “double-digit” (10%-plus) profit increases every year, and has achieved that in a static or shrinking market by constant cost-cutting. There have been redundancies at the Herald periodically since O’Reilly bought the paper in a sharemarket raid in 1996, and annually in the past few years, to the point where there are now only 18 general reporters in the main Auckland newsroom, fewer than half as many as in the mid-nineties. Two immediate factors have added impetus to this long drive to lower costs. First, the NZ economy has slowed and advertising has dropped, so profits from NZ failed to grow at the rate of APN’s Australian business in the past year. And second, O’Reilly has brought in US private equity partners Providence Equity Partners and Carlyle Group (whose board includes several senior figures from the first George Bush’s administration) to buy out the current minority shareholders. The price they are paying can only be justified by even higher profits, which means cutting costs even more savagely. The advantage for O’Reilly is that, by reducing his stake from 40% to 35% (but retaining control), he is extracting several hundred million dollars from the Australasian business for new investments, expected to be in fast-growing Asian markets (he already owns papers in India).
The problem, of course, is that contracting out subbing is both high-risk in purely practical terms and, we believe, almost certain to be a false economy which, far from boosting profits, will actually hasten the death of the newspapers that produce those profits.
Both Davidson and the Herald’s editor, Tim Murphy, acknowledge that communication between editors and reporters at the Herald and the other titles on the one hand, and Pagemasters subs on the other, will be “a challenge”. You all know that producing a newspaper requires an integrated team effort in which a sub can, for example, go back to a news editor and ask for more copy to fill a hole or explain that the instructions they have been given just won’t work, and can check facts and potential misinterpretations with reporters. At the moment that’s as easy as walking across a newsroom and takes all of a few seconds. Take the subs out of that newsroom and drop them into an isolated site where they are trying to juggle pages coming at them from news editors of eight separate publications, and you have a recipe for catastrophe. They will have to phone or email people they may not know in distant towns. They will be under far greater time pressure from news editors waiting on pages to get their papers away, while the Pagemasters subs will be forced to process pages in the queue to meet each editor’s demands as quickly as possible. The likelihood is that many of the communications that are made now to produce the best possible paper simply will not happen – stories will be squashed or spun out to fit the space available instead of suggesting changes to news editors, and facts will not be checked with reporters. Subs sitting in Auckland will have no idea of the background to a story they are subbing from Whangarei or Hastings – they may pick up spelling errors or inconsistencies in the text in front of them, but they will miss things that will be glaringly wrong to readers in the light of previous stories over many years or simply local knowledge.
The proposal is also high-risk because there is a high likelihood that Pagemasters will struggle to get many experienced subs at all. Our branches at the regional papers are not aware of any subs who are willing to move from the regional centres to Auckland, where house prices are much higher. Herald subs are so appalled at the way the company is showing that it places so little value on them that many of them are also feeling that they don’t want to work any longer for either the Herald or Pagemasters. Some are getting jobs in Australia or elsewhere; others are looking at complete career changes. Senior subs who have worked their way up through the industry to sub specialist sections at the country’s largest paper have no appetite to go back to square one into a factory environment where they will be subbing parish pump stories in local papers as well as the Herald and magazines on a production line basis.
More importantly in the longer term, this proposal seems to us to be suicidal for the publications involved, and therefore for O’Reilly himself. In the internet age, where agency stories are picked up and appear on multiple websites and blogsites, the value of newspaper sites backed by professional journalism will lie in (a) their distinctiveness, providing news, features and comment that cannot be found on other sites; and (b) their ability to build a community of involved readers around this distinctive journalism. Newspapers that thrive in this era will encourage feedback, comments and all kinds of participation by readers, fostering a sense that the readers “own” the paper, that it speaks for them. Both distinctiveness and that sense of community depend on having BOTH dedicated reporters, writers and editors AND dedicated sub-editors who carry the paper’s institutional memory on which its whole community relies. Chop out the subs, allow those glaring errors that no one with local knowledge would make, and you undermine the paper’s reputation in the community. Place all the subs in a factory where they have to sub multiple publications and you also bleach out the distinctive style and attitude that each publication cultivates when its staff operate as an integrated team; it will be impossible for subs to keep the styles of all eight publications in their heads, and it seems inevitable that the result will be eight bland produces that all look increasingly the same. It may work for Heinz baked beans; but for newspapers in the internet era, it would be disastrous.



Our submission, presented to APN NZ management on Black Friday 13 April, is [url=www.epmu.org.nz/SITE_Default/SITE_OurMedia/SITE_ormda/x-files/23172.pdf]
here (pdf file) [/url].


Other background material about our campaign against the proposed outsourcing, and against cuts in journalism in NZ generally, is at:

here



Cheers,

Simon Collins, NZ Herald journalists’ chapel delegate


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 Post subject:
PostPosted: Fri Apr 04, 2008 6:45 pm 
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Joined: Wed Jun 14, 2006 11:17 pm
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Location: Kamp Kaszyinski
Paul, it's been almost a year and an update on the NZ situation would be most appreciated. It sounded horrific a year ago; any word on how it's played out?


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 Post subject:
PostPosted: Sat Apr 05, 2008 8:49 am 
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Joined: Fri Nov 15, 2002 1:01 am
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Location: Cusp of retirement, grave or both
Can people in New Zealand actually read one-long-graf posts like that?


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 Post subject:
PostPosted: Sat Apr 05, 2008 7:24 pm 
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Joined: Wed Jun 14, 2006 11:17 pm
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Location: Kamp Kaszyinski
If you turn it upside down it's not as hard.


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 Post subject:
PostPosted: Sun Apr 06, 2008 9:49 pm 
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Joined: Wed Oct 08, 2003 12:01 am
Posts: 3137
Location: Homebush NSW Australia
Bumfketeer wrote:
Can people in New Zealand actually read one-long-graf posts like that?

The lack of pars reflects time poverty on my part and technical considerations. Will make inquiries about how this has panned out and get back to folks.


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