THE involuntary departure of distinguished foreign correspondent Christopher Walker from the Times late last week is only the highest-profile redundancy in what I understand is now quite a far-reaching cull at the newspaper. There is talk of at least 12 journalists and production staff being "let go". I’m told it will probably be closer to 20 - and there is a fear in Wapping it could be as high as 30.
"I won’t be finished with this process until the end of next week," managing editor George Brock told the paper’s staff association this week. "We’ve already seen the recent departure of messengers, graphic artists and sub-editors," one fearful Times
journalist told me. But it was only Walker being, in effect, fired after 32 years’ service that brought the extent of the cull to light.
Despite widespread anxiety - "there is a lot of apprehension in the newsroom," says another Times reporter - there will be no going back on the cuts: Rupert Murdoch is in town to ensure that editor Robert Thomson carries them out. There are rumours that a £4 million redundancy pot has been allocated to finance the cull.
Murdoch is angry that the loss-making Times looks like being lumbered with producing tabloid and broadsheet editions for the foreseeable future because of unexpected resistance among a substantial core of readers to the new tabloid format. The initial cost of producing both was put at £12-£15 million a year - on top of the £30 million in losses the paper racked up last year (wiping out the Sunday Times’s profits).
Hence the serious search for savings even as buoyancy returns to the advertising market and the paper’s sales in June so far show a healthy 3 per cent rise year-on-year.
But Murdoch is also in curmudgeonly mood because Thomson has been instructed in the past to get a grip on costs and failed. Hence the extent of the cull, which has been rumoured for weeks but whose severity has come as a shock.
The journalists have their own reasons to be angry. There is dismay that hard-pressed production staff are being made redundant when the paper has just shelled out a small fortune to lure US-based columnist Gerard Baker from the Financial Times. Nor does Thomson have much appetite to swing the axe when it could be used to greatest effect with the least impact on the paper - on the bulging bureaucracy of executive editors and the legion of leader writers, which remain largely untouched.
No programme of redundancies is ever easy to implement, but there is unease at the strangely Kafkaesque approach to them. The word "redundancy" has been banned. Production staff coaxed into leaving are called "assisted departures"; journalists shown the door are known as "agreed departures". Nobody has been given a specific reason why they’ve been picked: Walker has told friends he still does not know why he’s being forced to leave.
"The Times is in real financial trouble," my man in Wapping with the key to the executive loo told me. "But everybody’s been told to keep quiet about it." Everybody, that is, bar Murdoch, who has left his senior executives in no doubt that he is furious that, almost a quarter of a century after he bought the Times, it is still costing him what most of us would call a fortune.
INDEPENDENT STUNT WAS A WEEK TOO LATESALES of Simon Kelner’s Independent may have slowed recently but it still managed a May ABC of 261,000 - up 17 per cent on last year and its highest monthly sale for seven years.
His penchant for "stunt" front pages, however, is getting silly. On Tuesday he splashed with "10 things the UKIP don’t want you to know about them". Talk about missing the boat! Almost all the points were already well known (Point 1: "UKIP’s 12 new MEPs are all white, male and aged 50-65" - Wow!).
More important: as the purpose of such stunts is not to report news but swing opinion, it should have been published before last week’s Euro-elections to have any effect. The Daily Mail did its exposé the day before polling.
The Mail giving the Indy lessons on investigating the excesses of Euro-scepticism - now that is a story.
Give us more carrot and less stickNO serious editor can quarrel with the determination of Paddy Harverson, the new press director of princes Charles and William, to demand corrections and apologies for Royal stories that are plain wrong.
Last weekend, after being taken by the Palace to the Press Complaints Commission for wrongly reporting that William had killed two animals, in Kenya and Chile, the Mail on Sunday had prominently to retract and apologise.
This is all very different from the way Harverson’s successful predecessor, Mark Bolland, behaved: he preferred to schmooze rather than berate or confront the press. But Harverson, who used to handle PR for Manchester United, is clearly made of sterner stuff, as he made clear on yesterday’s BBC Today programme.
However, he needs to remember that handling the press for the Royals requires the carrot as well as the stick. By all means call us to account when we get it wrong, but it would be useful if the Palace were quicker at confirming stories when we get them right (rather than obfuscating, which is the usual tactic).
And the best way of avoiding fiction about the Royals is to keep the press happy with a steady stream of accurate stories and pictures about them. It was on that basis that I helped to broker - and William has so far enjoyed - a relatively normal three years at St Andrews University, where I was rector when he began his studies.
Harverson could do worse than study that agreement for the successful mix of stick and carrot.
Is Weaver set to be first female editor of the Mirror?THE search for a new editor of the Daily Mirror continues without resolution. It is now five weeks since Piers Morgan was given his P45 and still no white smoke from Trinity Mirror’s Canary Wharf HQ.
As anticipated on this page last week, when the job was trailed in front of News of the World editor Andy Coulson, he turned it down, reckoning he had a rosier future at News International. But I understand he’s not the only one to have refused the Trinity shilling.
Word reaches me from the Independent that its editor, Simon Kelner, was also in the frame for the Mirror job, but that he also declined.
Mischievous folk (of which Fleet Street has a few) say that this is being put about by the Kelner camp to increase his leverage for a pay rise after the successful transformation of the Indy into a tabloid. But well-placed sources tell me Kelner was indeed approached personally by Trinity chief executive Sly Bailey, and that he turned her down because it was clear she had no discernible strategy to rescue the ailing tabloid red-top.
Bailey is now turning her attention to internal candidates and moving into view is Tina Weaver, the editor of the Sunday Mirror. She returns shortly from maternity leave, during which her job was done by Richard Wallace. He was brought back from New York and is thought to have done well as acting editor. So the thought is that he would stay at the Sunday Mirror while Weaver moves over to the daily.
Only a brave - or foolhardy - media commentator would make anybody favourite in this protracted and convoluted appointment process, but acting Mirror editor Des Kelly does not rate his own chances, while Mirror executive editor Phil Hall has apparently ruled himself out. So Weaver would appear to have as good a chance as anybody.
If she gets it, she would be the Mirror’s first-ever female editor, as is Rebekah Wade at the Sun and Dawn Neeson at the Star. A hat-trick for the sisterhood. Who said red-tops were a man’s world?
NO SCOOPS, PLEASE, WE'RE REUTERSFIRST it was the BBC, now Reuters: don’t bother with scoops. The BBC edict came in the aftermath of Hutton, when Beeb journalists were already feeling cowed; thankfully, it has already been largely forgotten.
The Reuters edict comes from its lawyers after the wire service fell foul of financial regulators for the premature release of market-sensitive information, and might be harder to shake off. Like the BBC at the time, Reuters bosses insist they are not really dissuading journalists from seeking scoops - just urging them to be more careful with information that comes under the regulator’s purview.
But it is also a matter of newsroom culture. When journalists know there are no Brownie points for scoops, they tend not to take the risks required to get them.
