EPMU members upstage media awards

May 18, 2007
Media Release

Engineering, Printing and Manufacturing Union members have taken the stage at the Qantas Media Awards to protest plans by their employer, APN, to outsource its subediting to Australian company PageMasters.

The protesting union members, who are mostly award-winning journalists, unfurled a protest banner and made a speech condemning the cuts.

EPMU delegate and New Zealand Herald reporter Simon Collins is one of the journalists protesting and says the continued cost-cutting in New Zealand’s newsrooms will make journalism awards increasingly meaningless.

“We don’t think it’s appropriate to celebrate quality journalism at a time when that quality is being sacrificed in the pursuit of profit. As one of our members said to me recently, we’re only winning these awards because we’ve been subbed, and that’s precisely what APN is planning to do away with.

“We’re calling for APN to abandon its plan to outsource our subs and figured there was no better forum to make this call than a gathering of New Zealand’s top journalists. These awards are about decent journalism and that means properly run newsrooms.”

The EPMU is New Zealand’s largest media union, representing 5000 print and media workers.

The protesting journalists are:

Simon Collins, social issues reporter, NZ Herald
Angela Gregory, pacific affairs reporter, NZ Herald
Claire Harvey, Canvas magazine deputy editor and former columnist, NZ Herald
Martin Johnston, health reporter, NZ Herald
Anne-Marie Emerson, reporter and books editor, Wanganui Chronicle

ENDS

Collins’ speech to the Qantas Media Awards follows:

We can’t in all conscience celebrate excellence in journalism while our employers are undermining excellence in future by editorial cuts and contracting out.

We work for APN, which is planning to contract out its subediting to an Australian company called PageMasters.

As you know, subs hold the institutional memory of a newspaper; they are a key part of the team effort that produces a quality newspaper which gives a voice to its community.

They are the people who know the whole background to a story which the junior reporter writing the story may know very little about.

When you take subs out of their community in Northland, Bay of Plenty, Hawkes Bay or Wanganui and put them in a factory in Auckland, divorced even from the reporters on the local newspaper, the Herald, the result must be stories that are less well informed, more likely to contain mistakes, and which the community can no longer trust.

If they don’t trust us they won’t keep buying the paper, and the advertisers will desert us too. It’s a false economy.

Our union has asked APN to consult again about this, properly. We know this been imposed on them from outside, from our owner in Ireland, Tony O’Reilly. Even at this late hour, we urge our managers to go back to O’Reilly, explain that in the name of cost-cutting he risks destroying his newspapers, and ask him to think again.

We think this is also an issue for all of us as citizens. We are convening a media summit in the Banquet Hall of Parliament in August to stimulate a national debate on how we can foster quality media that truly gives a voice to their communities. Our democracy depends on it.

ENDS