Major changes at the Express & Star

The Midland News Association, publishers of the Express & Star and Shropshire Star, are carrying out a major restructuring programme to help the company deal with poor trading conditions.

The two main businesses - The Express & Star based in Wolverhampton and Shropshire Newspapers based in Telford - will be merged into one company with a single Board of Directors.

Some parts of the Production, Finance and Classified Advertising departments at both centres will be merged.

There may also be some structural changes in the Editorial, Advertising and Circulation departments.

As part of the reorganisation, printing of the Express & Star will be transferred from its West Bromwich print plant to other group print centres. Although, some weekly titles will continue to be printed there.

Greater efficiencies created by the organisational changes will result in lower staffing levels of around 10 per cent.

It is hoped staff savings can be achieved through voluntary redundancies across the group but some compulsory redundancies may be necessary to achieve an overall cost reduction of £3 million per year across all the newspaper publishing centres.

The Chairman of the Midland News Association, Mr Douglas Graham, said the changes would make significant savings at both newspaper centres but warned they would result in lower staffing levels.

He said that the company will become a fully integrated media business and stressed that once current economic conditions allow, the company will be well placed to take advantage of new opportunities.

Mr Alan Harris, currently Managing Director of the Express & Star, will become Managing Director of the new joint company. The company stressed that both papers would retain their separate identities with separate Editors and journalists.

The current edition structure at both newspapers will remain in place. In a letter to staff, the company said that trading conditions had been very difficult and continued to decline with seemingly little prospect of recovery over the next 18 months.

There had been a dramatic decline in revenues in the key employment, motoring and property categories of advertising. At the same time, costs of raw materials were increasing.

Mr Alan Harris said that the company was faced with the difficulties of how to keep its newspapers local to their communities but at the same time make cost savings because the company was no longer able to rely on growing advertising revenue. He said that every other newspaper in the country was wrestling with the same challenges.

The company has stressed that many staff would notice little change in their working situation and that it was determined to try to maintain the local editions of the two daily newspapers as well as those of the weekly newspapers within the group. Management are organising a series of meetings over the coming week to explain the changes in more detail to staff.