ACM makes more redundancies; concern for ‘future of several mastheads’
ACM has told employees that a number of jobs will be lost from the print production team, just three months after the last wave of redundancies at the regional media group.
ACM informed the Media, Entertainment & Arts Alliance union that as many as nine staff from the print production team — around a third of the team — will be made redundant, just three months after 35 jobs were lost across 11 newsrooms.
This latest cuts includes some of the “longest standing and most experienced sub editors and journalists” in the company, according to MEAA, tasked with quality control, and creating international and national pages for many ACM papers, “which hundreds of thousands of Australians read and rely on”.
The union has also expressed concern that several of the company’s daily printed mastheads could be reduced to Saturday-only printed editions, after eight newspapers were shut down in September.
At the time, managing director Tony Kendall attributing the cuts to the “loss of federal government advertising revenue and the loss of payments from Meta” and “reduced revenue from display and classifieds advertising and print circulation”.
The month prior, ACM shut down the daily print editions of the Central Western Daily in Orange, the Daily Liberal in Dubbo, and Bathurst’s Western Advocate.
The ACM publishes close to 100 regional news mastheads, including the Newcastle Herald, The Canberra Times, Illawarra Mercury, The Examiner, The Border Mail, and The Courier.
The MEAA calls this latest news “another blow to communities who rely on local papers for critical and relevant information” and has expressed further concern “these print producers could be replaced by artificial intelligence tools, given there is evidence that ACM is already using AI tools in the business”.
MEAA’s acting chief executive Adam Portelli said: “AI in Australia is still unregulated, and given Australians want strong laws to manage AI risks, any move by ACM to do this would be out of touch with community expectations.”
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Nathan Jolly is the Features Editor at Mumbrella. He joined the team in July, 2023.
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There’s another way to look at this – ACM are doing their best, in the face of reduced funding and a tough ad market – to deliver news to communities that none of the bigger publishers care to.
Take Nine publishing – they had a record year of subscription and revenue growth, and could easily be investing in news outside of the big cities, but they don’t because it comes down to scale and repayment to shareholders despite them being “independent Always”. Instead they laid off around 200 people.. It’s the unions job to throw rocks, but they should be thinking about who are the most worthy recipients of said rocks.
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High time there were cuts to ACM’s top-heavy editorial executive and leadership teams and their bloated salaries. Soon there’ll be no journos at grassroots level and al that will remain will be a bunch of the familiar and seemingly immovable and untouchable members of the leadership clique, who continue to pat themselves on the back and are convinced they are doing a brilliant job.
You can only cut at your core so much before the public rejects you. The ACM publication in my city is more like a leaflet than a newspaper these days, yet is filled with generic and statewide pieces and little to sometimes barely any local news. the website offers more of the same – generic state and national news.
It’s no surprise the audience has long rejected them, especially as ACM pushes experienced and well respected and admired journalists and photographers out the door while preferencing cheap and highly inexperienced staff.
I’m certain the C in ACM stands for ‘cheap’.
Nothing will change at ACM until mediocre management stops being rewarded.
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Regional Reader,
Wouldn’t call what ACM is doing delivering news to regions that others are uninterested in.
ACM plays scant respect to its regions. Publications barely contain any local stories, just a whole lot of syndicated yarns and the odd piece stolen from another ‘ACM region’.
As one independent publisher noted on Media Watch last year, if your business model relies predominantly on receiving government and other grants and handouts, it’s not much of a business model and doomed for failure.
ACM is a horribly mismanaged company.
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