Guardian/Observer Web Integration Redundancies Kick In
By Robert Andrews - Thu 20 Mar 2008 11:06 AM PST
It’s Guardian press correspondent Stephen Brook who has the task of reporting which of his colleagues are going as part of a redundancy round blamed on the paper’s 24/7 web integration strategy. A father-and-daughter reporting pair and a city subeditor are amongst 19 to leave The Guardian and The Observer (mostly the former) under a revised redundancy settlement inked in December, when Guardian News & Media and the National Union of Journalists finally agreed on how the publisher would move from a 16-hour-a-day operation to 24/7.
Back then, it was said redundancies would come only in “extreme circumstances” - continuing staff got a 4.8 percent pay rise in return for agreeing to work across media and to extend the working week by five hours. But today, managing editor Chris Elliot: “We are hiring more people for the web with a wide variety of skills and the voluntary redundancy scheme in other parts of the paper is a way of making space for the new hires.”
Posted in: Companies, Guardian Media Group, Media, Newspapers
