HR Issues

US news organisations are under tremendous pressure to find radical new ways to make money as their financial outlooks worsen despite embracing new technology. One way to do it may be to charge Web users for news in a way they cannot avoid -- their Internet access bill, the “State of the News Media 2007” has said. A taxi drives by the New York Times building in Times Square, New York. News outlets...

Journalists have reported extensively on information technology and financial services work migrating offshore. Now it’s their own jobs they can see disappearing over the horizon. In Britain and the US, the so-called outsourced newspaper is becoming a reality. Last Thursday, Tony O’Reilly’s Independent News & Media announced plans to hive off the downtable sub-editing of three of its Irish...

The 1000-strong Boston Globe employees union is now being backed by labour unions and local labour in their protest against outsourcing of jobs to India by the New York Times Company. The New York Times Company, which owns the Boston Globe, had recently announced the elimination of over 120 jobs at the newspaper. Of these, 55 jobs in advertising and finance would be outsourced to India. The New...

NEW YORK (AP) - The Village Voice, which has had four editors in just over a year, has fired its most recent one after a staff meeting on concerns about racial diversity, a spokeswoman said Saturday. David Blum was fired Friday after just six months as editor in chief of the alternative weekly, Maggie Shnayerson said. His termination followed a Wednesday meeting in which staffers discussed a lack...

The Financial Times has abandoned controversial plans for a new staff appraisal system. The proposal would have seen all staff categorised as outperformers, steady performers or underperformers. "After a healthy debate around the office about the suggested idea of people being fitted into categories, it was decided that it would no longer be pursued," said the National Union of Journalists' father...

US newspapers that spend more money on their newsrooms will be able to make more money, according to a study released Wednesday, which also questioned the wisdom of the media industry's trend of cutting jobs to save costs. A woman exits the New York Times building in Manhattan in 2006. The Internet is causing something of an earthquake in the US media industry, which last year reported a nearly...

The financially-ailing Pittsburgh Post-Gazette has reached tentative contracts with bargaining units from its 11 different labour unions, lifting a cloud of uncertainty surrounding the future of the 220-year-old daily, the newspaper reported. Votes on the three-year contracts, which would run from January 2007 to March 2010, will take place in the next two weeks, said Newspaper Guild President...

Steve Spendlove realizes that after last month's layoffs of most of the news-gathering staff at tiny KFTY-TV in Santa Rosa there will be less local coverage. The Clear Channel executive overseeing the station knows there won't be reporters to investigate local scandals, let alone do those fluffy woman-turns-100 features that make TV anchors cock their heads and smile at the end of a newscast. But...

In a windowless office in central Bangalore, dozens of employees are arriving to work on the night shift. They are journalists employed by the world's biggest news agency, Reuters. Their job is to cover US financial news. And they are working overnight so that they can report company news live as it happens on the New York Stock Exchange - from India. Cost savings But why in the world is Reuters...

LONDON (AFP) - BBC staff are to stage a two-day strike next week in protest over work being outsourced to India. Members of the Communication Workers Union (CWU) at the BBC's television licensing headquarters in Bristol, southwest England, were to take industrial action on Monday and Tuesday, warning that the outsourcing could lead to hundreds of job losses. More than 100 workers were to strike...