Monday, November 21

Trinity Mirror savage midlands local papers

Michelle Stanistreet, NUJ general secretary (pictured above) said: “Trinity Mirror has again taken the sledgehammer approach to local news provision. It is wrong for the company to continue to make profits and pay shareholders whilst the public and journalists face dire newspaper closures and job cuts. The decision to axe titles leaves the local community with only one remaining rival paper. The company have trampled on quality journalism, media plurality and the citizens right to know.”
Chris Morley, Northern & Midlands Organiser delivered the wreath which included the message "Chase Post, Sutton News & Stafford Post R.I.P under Trinity Mirror".  Members of the NUJ branch carried posters saying "Chase a buyer Trinity Mirror", "No! to Closure","Save Our Papers" and "Post Haste to Sale".
TheNUJ had called on Trinity Mirror to seek a buyer for the papers.

Chris Morley said: "Although we have laid this wreath, the NUJ does not believe these papers have to die. Trinity Mirror claims to have searched for a buyer, but has not been open about its efforts. It has an obligation by law to try to eliminate or reduce the number of redundancies the closure of these titles will bring about and one obvious way of doing that would be to actively seek a buyer.
“If it is serious about finding a new owner, Trinity Mirror should consider giving away the titles to any credible local investors with a clear interest in keeping them as the valuable community asset that they are. The group reaped the profits from these papers over the past ten years and should now be responsible to the community who provided those profits.
“The closure of these titles was announced in the same week that the new Localism Act was passed. As a union, we will be looking hard to see if this new Act’s provision for forcing companies to allow time for community groups to organise a bid to take over threatened local "assets of community value", could be adopted to save threatened local papers.”



Funeral Demo 18th Nov 2011 attended by Members (Tom Reed, Tony Collins and Martin Warrillow) who were made redundant by Trinity Mirror with Northern Organizer Chris Morley and Chris Youett held at the offices of the Chase Post marking its closure the dedication on the Birmingham & Coventry wreath reads: Chase Post, Sutton News and Stafford Post RIP under Trinity Mirror

No comments:

Post a Comment