Veteran political commentator Peter Riddell is to leave The Times as part of its voluntary redundancy scheme after 19 years with the newspaper.
Riddell, who is 61, told the Guardian today that his departure had been an ‘amicable” arrangement with management at the News International title.
The Times confirmed last week that 40 staff had opted to leave the paper under its voluntary redundancy scheme and that it expected to make around 20 compulsory redundancies as it bids to reduce its editorial budget by around ten per cent.
Details about other editorial staff set to leave The Times later this year were outliend today by The Guardian(read that here).
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Last month, editor James Harding told staff that Times Newspapers Limited, the News International subsidiary which is home to The Times and The Sunday Times, was losing a “significant amount of money”.
In addition, Harding said The Times needed to reduce editorial cost by ten per cent to “free up resources for the future of our journalism”.
The editorial cut at The Times is being mirrored across its sister paper, the Sunday Times, where a number of job losses are also expected.
Pre-tax losses for the Times and Sunday Times in the year to June 2009 increased to £87.7m from £50.2m the year before.
Both The Times and The Sunday Times launched new websites at the end of May ahead of a planned paywall introduction later this month.
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