Mirror Group to cut 200 editorial staff and end Scottish editions

Mirror Group Newspapers will cut 200 editorial staff across its Daily Mirror, Sunday Mirror and People titles.

"A significant number" of cuts will come from casual workers, a press release from the group states. A report from MediaGuardian suggests 60 casuals and 140 full-time posts will go. The company has launched a voluntary redundancy scheme.

The changes announced by the group will see an end to separate Scottish editions of the Mirror titles and outsourcing of some parts of the sub-editing process. The group is also proposing to create new 'super pools' of reporters and writers at the titles in a merger of news and features desks. "Our future is a multimedia one and we need to transform ourselves into an agile media business, ready to grasp the opportunities and challenges of the multimedia world we now inhabit," says Richard Wallace, Daily Mirror editor, in the release.

"Our traditional skills and processes have to change to embrace the emerging platforms and keep our titles in good health. We cannot continue to do what we do in the way that we have always done it. We simply have to evolve in order to keep our historic and world famous newspapers as relevant and successful as when they first launched over 100 years ago."

The group flagged up recent investment and introduction of a new content management system, ContentWatch, as part of an ongoing commitment to multimedia.

The National Union of Journalists' (NUJ) general secretary Jeremy Dear described the cuts as "Neanderthal".

"It's disgraceful that against a background of making more than £70m in profit last year and of paying millions in remuneration to a handful of Trinity mirror execs, the company should now throw more than a quarter of its talented, hardworking workforce onto the scrap heap," says Dear in a statement on the NUJ website.

"Sly Bailey's assurance that no more redundancies were planned has been shown to be a blatant lie. A 'multimedia future' without talented, multimedia journalists is a short cut to disaster.

"This savage package of redundancies is also a stark warning to editorial staff at national, regional and local newspapers all over the country, as they reveal the real, cost-cutting intent behind the introduction of content management systems such as ContentWatch, as used at the Trinity Mirror group and ATEX, as used across Johnston Press."

Next week Mirror Group Newspaper parent Trinity Mirror is expected to drop out of the FTSE250. In 2009 the publisher axed approximately 40 editorial staff at its Birmingham division BPM, as part of plans to tackle a £6 million forecast loss for the division in 2010. In the same year, Trinity Mirror chief executive Sly Bailey received a 66 per cent increase in her total renumeration package, including a £736,000 basic salary and pension contributions of £248,000.

"Richard Wallace, editor of the Daily Mirror these past six years, must deal with the current reality. He knows, as do we all, that we are heading towards a digital future and, even if we concede that newsprint will cling on for a good while, it is getting increasingly uncomfortable to work between two platforms," former editor of the Daily Mirror Roy Greenslade says in a blog post.

"So he has to make do and mend as best he can if he wants to hold together any semblance of his paper's dignity and integrity. Call it 'brand protection' if you must. Call it 'managing decline', if you want to be rude."

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