Guardian reveals cuts to pagination, casuals and Monday to Friday supplements

The Guardian has announced plans to cut £1m a year from its editorial budget by “rationalising” sub-editors and cutting back on the use of casuals.

A spokesman told Press Gazette that this was not a redundancy announcement and that no redundancies were accompanied by the changes.

It has also revealed plans to axe the stand-alone sport section from Tuesday to Friday (returning it to the back of the paper) and to also drop the Friday Film and Music supplement (merging that into the features section). This follows the axing of The Guardian’s seperate Media, Education and Society sections earlier this year.

One or two pages will be cut from sport, The Guardian reports, and comment will be cut from five pages to four with obituaries cut from two to one.

More changes are promised for the Saturday Guardian and The Observer in due course.

The moves come after the announcement in June that Guardian News and Media would start taking resources from print to invest in online in what was described by editor Alan Rusbridger as a “digital first” strategy.

Last year Guardian News and Media made an operating loss of £37.8m (up from £37.8m in the previous year) on turnover of £198.2m (down from £221m).

Income from digital is believed to comprise around £35m to £40m.

In November print sales of The Guardian dropped 16.3 per cent year on year.

At £1.20 a day on weekdays, The Guardian is now 20p more expensive than The Times and The Independent.

The Guardian has also revealed that it is do adopt a model pioneered by Swedish newspaper Svenska Dagbladet for the production of investigative journalism and news packages based around big scheduled events.

The upmarket tabloid plans much of its coverage well in advance with a motto “anything that can be done in advance, must be done in advance”, according to this report in The Guardian. Meetings are apparently held with staff standing up and no-one is allowed to read a list out loud.
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