Guardian Media Group makes Brooks redundant

The Guardian Media Group announced today that Tim Brooks, managing director of Guardian News & Media and a director of GMG, is to leave the company.

It said: "As part of the ongoing reshaping of the business, which includes a rationalisation of the management structure of GMG and GNM, the GMG board has decided that the post of GNM managing director is redundant.

"Tim will leave at the end of the financial year (March 31st) and commercial members of the GNM executive committee will report directly to GMG chief executive officer Andrew Miller."

Andrew Miller said: “On behalf of the GMG board I would like to thank Tim for everything he has done for GNM and the wider group over the last four and a half years. He has been a passionate and dedicated servant of the company and its journalism, he has played a crucial role in the Guardian’s ongoing digital transformation, and he has led the business with great integrity at a time of significant change and sometimes difficult choices. He leaves GNM with our best wishes for the future.”

Brooks said: “The best aspect of my work here has not been husbanding two of the finest news brands in the world; it has been the chance to work daily with the extraordinarily gifted and committed people of GNM. I will miss that greatly, and continue to consume their output with familial pride.”

• Writing in the latest issue of Press Gazette, Brooks said: "Guardian and Observer journalism has never been in better shape: witness the superb filtering, redaction, analysis and presentation which meant our investigative journalism was being talked about around the world in 2010."

Pic: The Guardian

Staff told GN&M is losing £100,000 a day

Staff at Guardian News & Media, publisher of the Guardian and Observer newspapers and the guardian.co.uk website, have been told more cost savings are to come.
MediaGuardian reports that GNM managing director Tim Brooks, has told staff in a memo that the current rate of losses at the company, which he said were £100,000 a day, was "unsustainable".
He said that GNM needed to "operate at a sustainable level, without compromising our core purpose". He told staff that the company was doing well in a difficult environment but that its revenues were under pressure.
Brooks is quoted by MediaGuardian as warning: "We are looking at everything – literally everything – that we do, to see how we can economise, and we will do whatever we can to keep the impact on staff to a minimum. However, because the biggest portion of our costs is people's salaries, we have to review staffing levels."
He added: "This is an unsettling and testing time for everybody, but the fact remains that we are – contrary to some reports by our competitors – very well placed compared to many of our peers."
GMG has said it was "not accurate" to say it has a "plan to shut the Observer" as part of its operational review but there is speculation that the world's oldest Sunday paper will be more closely integrated with the Guardian leading to job losses.