News Corp Australia has made another round of redundancies, this time at its metro titles.
Dozens of jobs have been cut from The Daily Telegraph, The Australian and The Herald Sun. It comes just weeks after the company slashed hundreds of jobs from its local papers as it shifted a majority of them to digital-only.
The latest cuts come as executive chairman Michael Miller says the company is moving to a “digital, growth-oriented” company focused on subscriptions.
“We are reshaping our operations to meet the needs of customers and clients - we will be much more focused on digital, growing digital subscriptions and simplifying our structures to be less complex for advertisers to leverage,” a News Corp spokesperson says.
“At a local level our focus is on developing our successful community news coverage approach which now makes up 50 per cent of our fast-growing subscription business. At a state and national level, we are going to better coordinate and harness our considerable journalist talent across Australia.”
As part of these changes, News Corp is setting up a sports newsroom, a team of national news reporters, a centralised subbing division and its NewsWire service.
“These initiatives to reposition News Corp Australia for growth will involve some job role changes and regretfully, some job losses,” the spokesperson says.
Peter Blunden, who stepped into the newly-created role of national executive editor last month, will oversee the centralised newsrooms, including the news wire. Speaking to the Australian, Blunden signalled that stories will be shared across metro papers, saying the “silo model” of journalism is over.
Have something to say on this? Share your views in the comments section below. Or if you have a news story or tip-off, drop us a line at adnews@yaffa.com.au
Sign up to the AdNews newsletter, like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter for breaking stories and campaigns throughout the day.