Scroogequest – Page 20 – thecumbriachronic.co.uk

By Phil Templates

WHEN Scroogequest snapped up the loss-making CN Group Ltd in March 2018, it wasn’t long before redundancy notices were handed out to dozens of experienced Sub-Editors.

You know, that costly band of older “grey cardigans” who knew their jobs inside out and might dare stand up to incoming Billy Big Bollocks.

Sub-Editors were long-serving staff who had dedicated their lives to their communities and local newspapers.

Designing pages, writing headlines, checking articles, supervising trainee reporters, and trying to maintain some semblance of journalistic standards at a local level.

So it’s no fault at all of Scroogequest’s current crop of young Churnalists that these youngsters now operate with far lower levels of supervision.

This burden, like so many others, has fallen on a handful of already over-stretched and word-blind “Audience and Content Editors”. (Themselves chained to faraway desks and staring at multiple screens for hours on end.)

But it does explain how embarrassing gaffes like the one below keeps occurring. Two MPs have just had chunks of their faces cut off by the Times & (Red) Star.

Someone failed to spot it before pressing “send” to the presses in distant Glasgow. (A straight yellow card in the old days.)

Yet even as newspaper content and page design declines, Scroogequest expects customers to pay more.

They recently hiked weekly paper prices in Cumbria ever closer to the £2 mark and tried to justify it with editorials pleading poverty.

Yet the company also managed to find the money to award just two of its directors a total of £700k in bonuses and sent £22.5 million of UK profits to its US-based parent company Gannett.

Furthermore, CN’s long-deserted headquarters, Newspaper House in Carlisle, has finally fallen to the bulldozers having been auctioned off in summer. The land sold for a cool £835,000

Who can afford Sub-Editors? Not Scroogequest, apparently!