Thursday 9 October Print and publishing profits at Northern and Shell, owner of Express Newspapers, rose by £10m to £33m last year - but the company is pushing ahead with a redundancy programme to cut 200 editorial jobs. The parent company turned a £5.6m loss into an operating profit of £37m and also collected £463.3m from the sale of Channel 5 to Viacom. The NUJ has accused chairman Richard Desmond of wilfully running the papers into the ground and urged him to sell them to "someone who cares about quality journalism". National organiser Laura Davidson said that staff were being cut to unacceptable levels, leaving those who remained with huge workloads. She called for a moratorium on the cuts that would reduce the editorial staff from 650 to 450. Read more from Press Gazette here
Richard Desmond
Express editorial cut by a third Journalists on the Daily and Sunday Express and Star have been told that 200 are to lose their jobs in a move to cut total staffing from 650 to 450. They have been invited to apply for voluntary redundancy, but compulsory sackings may follow if not enough people come forward by the end of August. The papers' NUJ chapel has said it will fight the cuts and denounced owner Richard Desmond as Britain's greediest billionaire, pointing to the fact that the sale of Channel 5 earlier this year raised £450m. Laura Davison, the union's national organiser, said staff at the papers had received no pay rise for seven years.
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October 2014 Harvey Jones, personal finance editor