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TEN MPs have protested to newspaper giant Trinity Mirror about its ongoing attacks on staffing levels at the Birmingham Post and Mail (BPM) and other regional titles.
Trinity Mirror, best known for the Daily Mirror, has announced plans to axe 19 BPM staff in Birmingham and six in Coventry.
The 10 MPs, all representing constituencies in and around Birmingham, have written to protest to Trinity Mirror chief executive Simon Fox and called for a meeting.
Management has already admitted that the paper can no longer “dutifully report everything which happens on our patch” or be a “paper of record.”
But the MPs have asked that “no irrevocable steps are taken in the meantime” and blamed the job losses on “underinvestment and poor management from the parent company in London.”
The redundancies are believed to represent a quarter of the paper’s editorial posts and are the latest in a swathe of staffing cuts at Trinity Mirror publications nationwide.
National Union of Journalists (NUJ) members in Birmingham and Coventry have passed motions of no confidence in the management over the proposal to introduce individual online audience targets, which they say will force them to abandon in-depth investigations in favour of shallow “click-bait” stories.
“We find it unbelievable that an established news organisation covering Britain’s second-largest city at a time of economic growth is failing to make a profit and that Birmingham is being talked of as being the first major city to lose its daily newspaper — if not now then quite possibly in the not too distant future,” said the paper’s National Union of Journalists chapels.
