Another piece of bad news for an editorial profession that is currently getting squeezed, as UK regional publisher Archant Suffolk is to cut more than 20 sub-editors and replace them with advertising designers - non-journalists.

Archant is currently in a one-month consultation process with staff, proposing that sub-editors at the East Anglian Daily Times and the Ipswich Evening Star can take redundancy or reapply for their jobs.

The move seems to be solely aimed at cutting costs: the ad designers would earn about £18,500 a year, compared to the sub-editors who currently earn about £26,000 a year.

"We are proposing that these [papers] will be laid out by highly skilled page designers, who do not have an editorial background. Under this proposal, of course, we would install all the necessary checking and proofing systems within the overall process," said an Archant internal document.

But "the use of non-journalists to lay out newspaper pages is a recipe for disaster. Without legal and journalistic training, they will have no idea of the potential pitfalls and the consequences could be catastrophic for the two papers," said Martin Chambers, the National Union of Journalists' father of the chapel Archant Suffolk.

The East Anglian Daily Times was just voted regional newspaper of the year at recent press awards.

Source: Guardian