April 20, 2012updated 12 Sep 2012 7:17pm

At least ten journalists cut as Centaur focuses on digital

Centaur has launched a consultation with staff over proposals to cut up to ten out of 26 editorial staff in its financial services division.

In a separate development the publisher also plans to centralise editorial production across of its weekly titles – including Marketing Week and The Lawyer – in a move likely to result in further redundancies.

Under the proposals up to ten of the 22 editorial staff in the financial services division – which also publishes the Mortgage Strategy, Fund Strategy and Corporate Adviser titles – could leave the company by the end of May.

The new structure will see a group editor appointed to oversee all titles within the division and the current editors of niche weeklies Mortgage Strategy and Fund Strategy have been asked to reapply for new roles such as associate editor, head of news and head of digital.

The proposals would see the financial services division come under two â€˜brand neutral' news teams – one concentrating solely on specialist investment news and the other on general industry news such as mortgage protection, regulation and policy issues. It will also see more content shared between Fund Strategy, Mortgage Strategy and Money Marketing.

Company sources said the changes were being driven by the need to restructure the newsrooms around digital production rather than print.

Details of the proposals and the number of expected redundancies will be ironed out over the next six weeks.

In June the company announced a wide-ranging restructure that saw it merge its business titles into three groups: creative and marketing, which includes Marketing Week and Creative Review; legal and financial, which includes The Lawyer and Money Marketing; and Engineering and HR.

Several publishers were made redundant and the print editions of Design Week and New Media Age were scrapped, with most of NMA's content now behind a paywall.

The most recent financial figures for Centaur revealed a 3 per cent drop in overall revenue but a 4 per cent rise in digital revenue, which now makes up almost a third of its total income.

The company said that underlying growth – which takes into account the impact of discontinued activities, acquisitions and disposals – was up 4 per cent in the first half of its financial year, while underlying earnings were up 39 per cent to £1.6m.