more jobs lost. its getting bad now


THE Liverpool Echo and her sister papers today announced a major restructure of their newsgathering on Merseyside.

The move will see a streamlining of the current operation with the loss of 43 jobs from the 175 editorial roles in the company’s Merseyside operation.

Parent company Trinity Mirror is to merge its news teams across Merseyside to provide up-to-the-minute online content for its websites as well as all material for its daily and weekly newspaper titles.

The Liverpool Daily Post is to move to five-day, Monday to Friday publishing, though online companion sites liverpoolecho.co.uk and liverpooldailypost.co.uk will remain seven days-a-week operations.

The changes will be implemented early next year and the company is committed to achieving as many of the redundancies as possible on a voluntary basis.

The escalating economic crisis has hit advertising revenues across the media industry and the Echo has moved quickly to safeguard its position.

It believes the revolutionary editorial plan will ensure a strong long-term future by providing rich, in-depth and absorbing content for the company’s steadily growing North West on-line audience which already exceeds 1.7m unique users a month.

Advertising revenues have been dwindling for year's mate, it's bound to happen. In addition to decreasing advertising rates and revenue, the take off of the internet is killing local newspapers.

A lot of people are just getting their news online from the likes of the BBC, who are a lot more credible and less biased/spin based/extremist/dishonest than the newspapers. How many newspapers would critisize themselves, the BBC News team do.

It's not just affecting newspapers, but all forms of media, working in and around the radio business, I have seen a lot of problems with that side of media and decreasing ad revenue problems.

Can't really blame the government for this one, id be more inclined to blame the newspapers themselves for turning readers away with their constant bullshit etc...

Think most of the redundancies are because of restructuring, not much to do with losing money. Like weeding out the crap staff!

A lot of the staff have other jobs anyway, journalist's that is, they arnt usually tied to one company. A few of the Echo journalist's, work for the BBC, and seem to have an entirely different tone when you read things by them on the BBC compared to things they write for the Echo.

When me and my workmates were made redundant, they said it was to do with loss of money, but the project had gone too far into wierd territory - they just didn't want to say that. The head company had made $1 billion last year. Losing a couple of million wouldn't have mattered.

If the company is making billions though, they will be listed on stock exhanges somewher. And that is where the problems are occuring, if their share price is lowering, then it will crash unless there is confidence in the markets from investors, to actually want to invest. And the easiest way for a company to do this, is to stop ALL loss making enterprises in their tracks, even projects that make even small profits.

Toshiba did'nt end HD-DVD because it was unprofitable, it was actually doing okay (profits arnt expected on technologies like that for years, due to the scale of the evelopment and investment and time it takes for mass consumer adoption). It was the overall scale of the impact that such a small division of their business was having on the share price that forced them to get rid. As soon as they announced the abandoment of the format, their share price jumped like 15%.