JOURNALISTS on The Daily Telegraph and The Sunday Telegraph agreed to hold a ballot for strike action at a packed union meeting yesterday after the papers’ management confirmed plans to make 54 editorial redundancies — out of a workforce estimated at 425 — and a further 79 in other departments.
A ballot will be held this month, and insiders said that the mood of the meeting was unambiguously in favour of a ballot. Nobody present voted against the decision, and some sort of strike action appears likely.
The cuts, presumably, are to help to pay for the impending move to Victoria and plans to transform reporters into multimedia producers, filing for the newspaper’s website in the morning, and producing audio and video in the afternoon and material for the next day’s newspaper. Exciting as all this may be, news of the job cuts has sapped already poor morale. It is less than a year since 90 other journalists were let go, leaving fewer reporters to produce more content.