Fairfax Media to build subbing hubs

Fairfax Media has announced plans to create hubs to carry out sub-editing for features, world and business pages for its newspapers.

Under the proposal for centres of expertise, subbing and layout of local and sports pages will remain the responsibility of editors and sub-editors within each masthead. Fairfax Media executive editor Paul Thompson said it would also allow newspapers to retain their own individual looks, and local emphasis.

"Feature pages and world and business pages require an expertise that is not always available at individual newspapers and, through this proposal, we can ensure that all our readers will have the same consistent standard of editing excellence," Mr Thompson said.

Some redundancies were likely but no firm numbers could be predicted until after the consultation period.

Mr Thompson said the newspapers involved have about 190 sub-editing staff and initial predictions indicated there could be about 40 redundancies. But until likely workloads and actual numbers were accurately determined, it was not possible to give firm numbers.

An announcement to staff had been brought forward from Wednesday to today because information about the proposal intended for staff had been inadvertently published on the Fairfax Media intranet.

After consulting further with staff, the intention is to create the hubs to operate under the direction of a Managing Editor Production. It is envisaged features production will be spread across Wellington and Christchurch, world news will be located in Christchurch and business news in Wellington.

Fairfax would also be looking to have more generic non-news pages such as TV and the weather undertaken by providers for the whole group.

The newspapers involved are the morning newspapers, The Dominion Post, The Press, the Taranaki Daily News, the Timaru Herald and the Southland Times and the evening Waikato Times, Manawatu Standard, the Nelson Mail and the Marlborough Express.

Mr Thompson also announced the company would be reviewing two other aspects of its business. Sub-editing processes and staffing at Fairfax Sundays and the Independent would be examined to see what gains could be made by shifting the editorial production of the business weekly and the business section of the Sunday Star Times to the new business centre of expertise.

The review will include a study of a proposal to merge the two subberies of the Sunday Star Times and Sunday News into one integrated team under a single production editor.

As well, the company wanted to review the subbing processes of Suburban Newspapers in Auckland. The company envisaged Suburbans would continue as a stand-alone combined subbery but it would be reviewing future productivity requirements including staff numbers and work outputs.

- © Fairfax NZ News