FT studies demand for "early retirement" & "voluntary redundancy"
The Financial Times needs to trim its staff by about 40 as a £2m cost-saving move, reports Fullrunner, a UK-based newsletter.
In a letter to staff last week, editor Andrew Gowers "wrote to staff at the Financial Times asking whether they would be interested in taking early retirement or voluntary redundancy."
Any editorial redundancies "will come on top of the departure of 15% of the newspaper's 600 commercial staff last year," says Fullrunner, which reports that FT will lose about £12m this year.
The newsletter says the cost of implementing "a fabulously complex content management system" called Methode (which "staffers at the paper have taken to calling it 'My Toad'") is adding budget pressure.
Fullrunner also passes along this item about Gowers:
In the same week that the FT tested staff attitudes to voluntary redundancies, Spin Bunny reported that Andrew Gowers unwisely left his tie-clip microphone switched on as he walked backstage after giving a presentation in Paris recently. Gowers answered his mobile -- only for the assembled front-of-house throng to hear him dismiss the event as the "usual load of bollocks and a waste of time".
Links:
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What's the story? Doug Millison also edits OnlineJournalist.org, "on a need-to-know basis"
