Birmingham Mail to cut jobs in major strategy shift
Trinity Mirror is to overhaul its strategy for the Birmingham Mail by separating its print and digital operations in a move that will lead to job losses.
The publishing giant will also relocate back into the city centre, nearly 10 years after moving to Fort Dunlop, in a move described as “long overdue” by editor Marc Reeves.
It will rebrand its Birmingham Mail website as Birmingham Live with the ambition of creating “a completely standalone, profitable and sustainable digital business”.
“The city is the youngest and most diverse in the UK, with a massive appetite for digital news and information,” said Reeves.
“Birmingham Live is our response to this, and a bold move to take the initiative to create a sustainable digital journalism business.
“Regrettably a number of jobs will go as we restructure. However, if the model we’re building is successful, we will be employing more journalists and serving more readers than would be the case if we sat back and did nothing.”
Trinity Mirror has been the most progressive of the large media organisations in responding to the huge pressures that online publishing have brought to the industry.
However it – in common with other newspaper groups – has found it difficult to fully replace the revenues it lost to online rivals, with online advertising spend now dominated by Google and Facebook.
The Birmingham Mail, which sells around 18,000 copies a day, will be supported by “print-only content roles” – journalists, who will be focused on the newspaper. Currently Trinity Mirror newsrooms have a digital-first strategy, where journalists are in part measured by online performance of their output.
