Yesterday STV announced a number of job losses at the organisation, along with the closure of STV2 and the end of the east coast edition of STV News. Instead viewers in Fife and Edinburgh will only receive a brief update of local content with the remainder of the programme being produced in Glasgow.
In a devastating blow to workers at STV, these changes will result in 34 jobs from its news department being made redundant, along with a further 25 jobs associated with STV2. This is despite STV making a pre-tax profit of £18m and the new CEO Simon Pitt being greeted with a ‘golden hello’ of over £800,000.
With the east coast edition of the STV News, issues that may previously have not made the national bulletin but were important to the Kingdom have been given the time and respect they deserve. These redundancies risk undermining that.
Our press do a great, if often undervalued, job and it will stick in the craw for many that the news was delivered as part of cost cutting measures from a CEO that was awarded a ‘golden hello’ of over £800,000.
At a time when BBC is launching a new channel and Glasgow is making a strong bid to be the new headquarters for Channel 4, we should be looking to build our media capacity in Scotland not diminish it.
STV must think again about axing the east coast news and ensure that the station can continue to deliver a news service that the whole of Scotland deserves.