Trinity Mirror has announced that there will be ten new editorial redundancies at the Manchester Evening News and its sister weekly titles.
The job losses will come as it merges the editorial teams of the Manchester Evening News and the 22 weekly sister titles.
The changes are to be completed in time for the September move from the current city centre offices in Manchester to new premises in Oldham.
MEN Media was bought by Trinity Mirror from Guardian Media Group for £7.4m in a deal that was revealed in February.
In 2009, MEN Media cut 78 editorial jobs when it closed the weekly newspaper offices and moved their editorial teams in with that of the Evening News.
Under the new plans, announced today, MEN Media said: “Teams of reporters will cover specific geographic areas, creating content for all of MEN Media’s titles and platforms. There will be a single management structure to lead the newsroom, with a strengthened emphasis on content creation.
“Production will be handled by a single team, but with dedicated ‘product champion’ roles within the team to ensure that quality and local knowledge are retained.
“The restructure will be underpinned by a comprehensive training programme and new equipment to allow reporters to undertake complete multimedia reporting.”
The company said that up to ten jobs could go, but that it hoped the number of redundancies would be fewer than this.
As part of the restructure, a number of new roles will be created, MEN Media said, two of which will focus on ‘the creation of high-quality, user-generated content”.
MEN Media editor-in-chief Maria McGeoghan said: ‘The reorganisation of our newsroom is aimed at reinforcing the high standards of journalism across all of our products, to serve our audiences better and to create one great team.
‘I want to put original, local content at the heart of everything we do. We need to work smarter to gather first-class material, publish creatively, ensure consistently high standards, avoid duplication of effort and spread the workload more effectively.
‘I am proud of our editorial team, who I believe represent the best of journalism in our region. This process is about using their skills in a better way, to make the business a success and to secure its long-term future.”
Although the weekly title journalists moved into the Evening News offices a year ago, according to Trinity Mirror the operations remained separate.
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