Print Round-Up: Trinity Local Closures; Observer Strike Threat; londonpaper Execs Redeployed
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—Trinity closures: More local weeklies bite the dust: Trinity Mirror’s paid-for Whitchurch Herald, the free Wrexham Chronicle and Mid-Cheshire Chronicle will cease publishing next week. Trinity says it expects eight editorial and three commercial roles to be made redundant. From HTFP.
SEE ALSO: Vodafone Ditches DRM For A La Carte Music; Three Majors Aboard
—Observer strike threat: Union activists at The Observer have promised to launch industrial action “if one single NUJ member” at the Guardian or Observer is handed a compulsory redundancy notice, after GNM said it would further integrate the two The Observer could have been shut down. From Press Gazette.
—Londonpaper staff: The freesheet published its last copy on Friday and while 40 staff have been made redundant, MD Ian Clark, editor Stefano Hatfield, head of trading Naim Halloum and marketing direction Nicole Refson are understood to have been offered jobs within the group, amongst 20 other redeployments. Via Media Week.
But Ofcom, in its submission to the Department for Media, Culture & Sport’s consultation on the idea, warns that a more “localised” option - in which consortium partners provide multimedia, online news for specific towns and communities - will cost between £60 million and £100 million a year nationally, funded from £130 million in licence fee money set aside for the digital switchover. A service which just replaces ITV’s regional TV news will cost between £40 million and £60 million.
Would-be consortium partners are warned that just to replicate one ITV (LSE: ITV) regional news service would cost up to £4 million today—so they may well have to raise money themselves through TV advertising and licensing content. Ofcom estimates that, if the status quo remains, ITV will be losing £64 million a year on regional news by 2012.
In a separate document laying bare the crisis in local/regional publishing in all media, Ofcom spells out how the IFNC system might work…
—Regional and local news made by professional organisations and published across TV, online text, online video and possibly even print.
—There will be “new opportunities for partnerships between local newspapers and other organisations, including the BBC, and to create new commercial and community options for localness in television, radio and on the internet”.
—Amateur news groups and community organisations would contribute to and have access to news content.
The document suggests that” digitally stored” online video news could be made available to non-consortium members via the BBC iPlayer; the Press Association has already offered to allow its text and video wires to be the standard distribution channels for IFNC PSB content. Ofcom’s consortium response (pdf).
Posted In: Media & Publishing, Newspapers, Companies, Guardian Media Group, News Corp., News International, Trinity Mirror
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