Eight staff laid off at Express

Eight people will lose their jobs with The Marlborough Express as its parent company Fairfax centralises operations.

The Marlborough Express general manager Roger Rose acknowledged the staff loss was "terrible" and two of the people affected had been employed by the paper all their working lives.

But a drop in advertising sales forced Fairfax managers to looking at ways of cutting costs, he said.

"This is probably a managed way of getting on, by putting people off.

"It gives [Fairfax] a chance of gathering all the best people in the country in these `hubs' and trying to work the system with a restricted number of people."

The eight people who were handed redundancy notices at the Express this week assembled advertisements, Mr Rose said.

Of the 13-member team doing that, five will be kept on in Blenheim. Five of the eight losing their jobs had sought voluntary redundancies and the remaining three had applied for positions with the pre-press hubs in Christchurch and Wellington. They were unsuccessful.

Mr Rose said the current recession had affected advertising sales but he was confident The Marlborough Express, first printed in 1866, would remain a leading source of news in the top of the south.

More staff changes are "in the wind", however. Fairfax will introduce a new centralised accounting system and is reviewing its publishing and circulation operations.

"We're in a state of flux; there's a lot of uncertainty," Mr Rose said. All Fairfax papers were affected by the changes, he said.

The Marlborough Express editor Lance Dodd said the paper was not looking at any job losses on the editorial floor at this stage. "We are running a pretty lean operation at the moment."

- The Marlborough Express