Archant Norfolk journalists vote for strike ballot over job cuts

Journalists at Archant Norfolk have voted to ballot for strike action, following plans which could see up to 20 editorial jobs cut.

Last month Archant announced the latest proposals at its Norfolk division, including the creation of a new digital department, which could lead to up to 20 job losses from the editorial team.

Members of the National Union of Journalists who took part in the vote say they are hopeful of a positive outcome from talks with management later this week.

Archant Norfolk produces daily titles the Eastern Daily Press and Norwich Evening News, as well as 10 weekly paid-for and free newspaper titles including the Great Yarmouth Mercury and North Norfolk News.

The publisher said a number of new roles will be created to help the editorial team achieve the proposals and no reporter jobs will be lost.

Today NUJ father of the chapel at Archant Norfolk Pete Kelley told Journalism.co.uk staff are expecting to be given "a decent hearing" by the publisher.

"We suffered redundancies of about 26 people two years ago and we also in the last year had a major investment in new technology and retraining and basically doing huge amounts of overtime to keep things running, so I think staff are pretty shocked to hear at the proposals for new job losses, basically at a time when they think they should be congratulated not facing losing their jobs.

"It's important to stress that this is about keeping our options open. We are actually having some pretty positive talks with the company at the moment and, in fact, they've asked us to give them our counter-proposals this Thursday, so in a sense it would seem an odd time to be adopting a more confrontational approach but it is simply to keep our options open. It takes about three weeks to get permission to take industrial action. We're all hoping we will never have to do that."

Archant declined to comment.

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