STAFF AT the Irish Examiner and Evening Echo are to ballot this week on a 5 per cent wage cut.
Over the weekend Thomas Crosbie Holdings (TCH) denied reports it had sought or received offers for the Evening Echo after a Cork radio station ran a news item about the proposed sale of the title.
The National Union of Journalist will this week conduct a postal ballot of its members on the 5 per cent pay cut. The results of the ballot are due next Monday.
Employees at the two newspapers are being asked to take a pay cut of 5 per cent from April 2nd arising from a drop in advertising revenue and ongoing financial difficulties.
Last month TCH chairman Alan Crosbie told a conference on media diversity that newspapers were overly dependent on “fickle” advertising and that the dual-funding of RTÉ through licence fee and advertising revenues “distorts the market for everyone”.
Mr Crosbie said he had been campaigning for a share of licence fee revenues “for 20 years, though the good times and the bad times”.
The proposed cuts come on top of previous cuts averaging 8.5 per cent last year. In 2010 cuts were made to expenses paid to staff and a pay freeze was introduced. Pension benefits have also been cut.
TCH made a pretax loss of €6.3 million in 2010, with revenues down 13 per cent to €71.8 million.
Despite the €10.7 million fall in revenues, a cost-cutting programme meant operating losses were contained to €3.1 million, up from €2.9 million the previous year. The pretax loss was sharply reduced on 2009, a year in which the company wrote down the value of its media brands by €30 million.
Alongside the Irish Examiner and the Sunday Business Post, TCH, a fifth-generation family business in Cork, counts several regional newspapers among its titles, including the Evening Echo, the Western People, the Wexford Echo and the Roscommon Herald.