Sixteen jobs are at risk at Teletext after it announced that more editorial work would be outsourced to the the Press Association’s centre in Howden, East Yorkshire.
An expanded team at Howden is to take over handling viewer calls and emails, production and some writing for Teletext’s entertainment section.
Teletext editor-in-chief John Sage said: “In the current economic climate we have to ensure that we are delivering editorial services in as efficient a way as possible and these changes will expand our existing relationship with the Press Association, while retaining other external specialists to keep the distinctive character of our various entertainment magazines.
“The Press Association already gives us a range of bespoke services and has a great deal of experience of Teletext services.
“The Press Association has an excellent track record of supply to us and we are confident that they will ensure a continued high-quality viewer experience.”
Teletext is also reducing its news service in response to Ofcom’s public service broadcasting review last month.
The report said: “The increasing availability of text based services, both broadcast and online may mean that post 2014 there is no longer clear justification for continued intervention to maintain a public service teletext licence.”
Teletext is to cut its national news section from 30 pages to 20, reducing the number of individual news stories but retaining all its viewer opinion pages.
It also announced cutbacks in its regional news service to take into account the changes to the ITV news regions – meaning that, for instance, West/West Country and East/WEst Midlands viewers receive a single selection of 14 stories across two regions – rather than ten stories for each region as was the case before.
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