AN OPEN LETTER TO GUARDIAN READERS
THE Manchester Evening News is Britain's biggest regional newspaper. It holds the powerful to account and gives the weak a voice. It uncovers and reports the news with no agenda other than to serve the public interest. Our weekly papers do the same in the towns around Greater Manchester. For a region of 2.5m people, these newspapers are a linchpin of democracy.
Throughout our proud history, these papers always made a profit, providing tens of millions of pounds a year to enable our loss-making sister paper - The Guardian - to survive and flourish.
But senior management of the Guardian Media Group have now decided the MEN and our weekly papers, which will still make £2m this year, must make devastating staff cuts to service the ongoing expansion of the Guardian - which is losing many millions but still paying executive bonuses.
At a time when fair, investigative and independent journalism is more important than ever, the MEN has been ordered to cut 39 editorial jobs out of 89. Nineteen journalists will be made compulsorily redundant. Another 35 journalists are to lose their jobs from the Group's 22 weekly papers in Greater Manchester. All the weekly offices will close and the titles will be put together at the MEN's head office.
A further 35 journalist jobs will go at the company's Surrey and Berkshire papers, with some publications closing and the Reading Evening Post cut to twice-weekly publication. Compulsory redundancies are inevitable. Many non-journalist jobs are also being axed.
These swingeing cuts have been approved by the Scott Trust, set up in 1936 to protect the Guardian and MEN as independent voices. The Trust has since narrowed its remit to protect only the Guardian, but it still claims to operate by the values laid down by CP Scott, the renowned editor of the Manchester Guardian, in 1921. They include 'a sense of duty to the reader and the community'.
In rubber-stamping these cuts, the Trust has approved the decimation of a great regional newspaper in the city which was the birthplace of The Guardian.
The cuts will inevitably mean the MEN's role and that of the weekly papers, in scrutinising local councils, NHS trusts, police and reporting on injustice, incompetence and corruption, is diminished.
CP Scott also wrote: "[A newspaper] is much more than a business; it is an institution; it reflects and it influences the life of a whole community; it may affect even wider destinies."
This is as true of the MEN, the Reading Evening Post and our weekly papers as it is of the Guardian.
We urge the Scott Trust to reconsider and show loyalty to the MEN, which is the soul of a great city and has played a crucial part in enabling the Guardian to remain the flagship of liberal journalism.
You can help keep local papers alive and relevant by asking your MP to sign Early Day Motions 916 and 1044 and by writing to the chair of the Scott Trust, Dame Liz Forgan, at <mailto:liz.forgan@guardian.c.uk>liz.forgan@guardian.co.uk For more information, go to <http://www.menchapel.org.uk/>www.menchapel.org.uk
Signed - GMG Regional Media journalists
FOR MORE INFORMATION SEE www.nuj.org.uk