SPP Group redundancies
One of the advantages of monopolising the press in the Highlands is that it’s easy to hide bad news about yourself.
The Scottish Provincial Press – aka, SPP Group – has a number of trading interests, and own a whole string of major papers across the Highlands, plus a number of private magazines as well.
That’s probably why news of the recent redundancies at the group hasn’t hit any headlines. In fact, it’s difficult to find out how many people have actually been made redundant by the SPP Group over this year.
Certainly the company itself doesn’t seem keen to say anything – I can’t find anything on Google connecting the words “redundancy” or “redundancies” with “SPP Group” of “Scottish Provincial Press”.
Perhaps I’m just not searching the right way – or else the SPP seem to be doing a very good job of keeping a lid on the news.
Comments
3 Responses to “SPP Group redundancies”
Leave a Reply
Visited 857 times, 2 so far today
Last year and this, staff at SPP were offered / encouraged / urged to accept voluntary redundancy packages.
SPP is part of the Peter Press company, owned by Peter Fowler, as is English local paper group Jacob and Johnson, but recently the business borrowed heavily just before advertising revenues in England were hit by the recession.
Unfortunately the simplest way to deal with this was to cut staff costs and even papers where the editorial staff had been cut to an editor and a trainee reporter were not immune.
Earlier this year the editors of the Forres Gazette, Banffshire Herald and the Northern Times and two senior reporters on the North Star and the Strathspey and Badenoch Herald were told they were being made redundant and replaced with a trainee.
Now several papers are being edited centrally and staffed with one or two inexperienced junior reporters.
Before this a group of six trainee reporters for the group’s new online pages were sacked before they had even started work.
Newspapers in general have cut staffing levels so much that most are filled with verbatim press releases and maybe a couple of distinct stories on the front to differentiate them.
For the last decade or so, the sensible journalist has moved into public relations but now they are being called upon again to write the paper.
Many in PR already know there are too few staff on many publications to subject their press releases to even the most basic level of scruitiny and so the concern is that they will soon (or maybe already have) begin issuing lies which will be assumed to be the truth by time-pressurised reporters.
In some cases journalists who ask supplementary questions about press releases are deemed to be problematic by PR departments and their editors are threatened that the supply of “stories” from these sources will run dry unless the reporter is told to be less inquisitive.
Disgruntled Journalist
All newspapers are currently struggling in terms of circulation that affects their income.
Part of the problem many companies have in terms of making changes is that of both editorial and production unions resisting change.
Content is all important and you are right to highlight the blatant use of press releases which are often published unchecked, but is this not sometimes down to reporters and journalists sometimes being shall we say lazy! The temptation to cut and paste a well-written piece of PR is all too tempting; after all it was probably written by someone who had a whole week or more just to write that one story.
Some newspapers have taken what you might consider bold steps. Not using sub editors, with reporters writing directly onto the page, and also giving journalists a multimedia role using the likes of cameras and recording equipment (This is currently being taught to many college students as part of their journalist training).
Adopting some of the changes listed above would mean that the front line journalist stayed in post and continued to gather all-important content.
Changes are nothing new to the newspaper industry; remember hot metal and typewriters being swapped for computer-based systems?
I wonder when how many days you currently spend out of the office gathering material from the community rather than being sat in front of your computer?
Disgruntled I tend to agree with much of what Donald has said. I appreciate that it’s not nice working in an environment where you are uncertain about your job but that is a reality for many people these days.
The world of news has changed so much in the past 10 years. Here we are writing on a blog, which Brian has set up. In common with many blogs he doesn’t get paid any money but provides a platform for news and debate which before now you would have seen in the letters page of a newspaper, but this is much more immediate and not limited by column inches
Together with other local blogs such as the gurn many news stories are published before the Nairnshire appears weekly on our streets.
The same is true even for daily papers with news being published on the web before it appears in print.
I hope newspapers do survive but they must adapt and change rather than do nothing and die, and that change of attitude has to come from everyone who is involved with them