Employees in The Commercial Appeal’s advertising department have been asked to re-apply for their jobs, according to a source with the Memphis Newspaper Guild.
Daniel Connolly, president of the Guild, said no other departments at the Memphis daily newspaper have been affected, only advertising. He said the process is ongoing and that the deadline for employees to turn in resumes for those jobs was earlier this week.
“The Guild filed a grievance (formal complaint) about this process last week and requested information,” Connolly said. “We’ve received some information back from the company and we’re reviewing the issue.”
The move comes a little more than a week after Gannett Co., Inc., the company which has owned the paper for about a year, cut 20 employees from the CA’s newsroom.
Firing employees and asking them to re-apply for jobs inside the company is a total Gannett move. In 2014, Gannett instituted its “Newsroom of the Future” in five newspapers, including The Tennessean. Staffers were fired and were made to re-apply for new jobs with new job titles in the newsroom.
Many newsroom staffers were cut. But pay was not expected to drop for those employees who won those new jobs, at least that’s what Tennessean vice president and executive editor Stefanie Murray told The Poynter Institute at the time.
A call to Gannett for comment on the situation in Memphis was not immediately answered.
