RiverMedia cuts staff and wages
31 March 09

The River Media newspaper publishing group has cut staff wages by 10 per cent and made some staff reductions, it emerged last week.

River Media's Tim Collins confirmed that staff at all its titles, which include the Letterkenny Post, the Derry News, Inish Times and County Derry Post had their salaries cut, by agreement, at the start of the year.

He said management had taken larger salary cuts than other staff and said he expected the group would manage to break even this year, despite the advertising downturn that has made the wage cuts necessary.

River Media, a relatively new company set up by Collins and business partner Padraig Dwyer, was loss-making last year and in 2007.

It has launched a succession of new regional titles aimed at 20-year-old plus readership over the past three years and claims readership of 60,000 for the Letterkenny Post, 60,000 for Derry News and 120,000 for the Kildare Post. The cuts at River Media follow salary cuts and redundancies in national media, the latest of which were announced last week byTV3.

The regional press has suffered an average drop of 30 per cent in advertising revenue in the past 18 months.