At least a few dozen editors and reporters are staring into joblessness after the only two national dailies, New Vision and Daily Monitor, both move to merge their Saturday and Sunday editions.
In a notice to employees, Vision Group CEO, Don Wanyama announced that the company had resolved to have single editions for weekends for both the Luganda and English papers following demand from their audience.
“The media landscape today is in constant change and that means for us to remain relevant and meet our audience needs, we too must change. … it is clear that we must offer our newspaper readers a distinct product over the weekends,” Wanyama said.
“Therefore, starting January, 20,2024, we are introducing single English and Luganda language weekend editions.”
He however allayed any fears, noting that these two weekend editions will be “bigger, bolder and with very exciting and engaging content for everyone”.
Daily Monitor to follow suit
The UG Bulletin has separately learnt that Namuwongo-based publisher, Daily Monitor is also set to take a similar direction for its weekend editions.
“Our weekend editions will be merged to come up with a single edition. There will be only one paper on weekends. This is in the pipeline and will be implemented soon,” a staffer at Namuwongo told this website.
It is said that for Daily Monitor, it will be more than a weekend merger with proposals to make products like Sqoop digital and take others such as Home as monthly pullouts in the paper.
This state of affairs is set to see a number of journalists who worked as reporters and editors who worked on the weekend editions loses their jobs as the country’s only dailies move to cut costs amid tougher markets defined by shrinking copy sales and advert revenues.
Trend
This move to cut has been seen elsewhere within the region, with the New Times Rwanda ceasing all print editions in 2019. It currently publishes e-paper.
In Tanzania, The Citizen newspaper last year announced it was ceasing print editions to go digital.
