Nation Media Group To Lay Off Hundreds of Staff

Tuesday, June 27, 2023 –Nation Media Group NMG has again announced further restructuring in newsroom to cut on costs amid fallout with government.

Homenews.co.ke has learnt that, in thier tension-packed staff meeting held today Tuesday June 27 morning at Nation Centre, the company’s head office in Nairobi, and attended across the bureaus through a virtual link, NMG top management said it will soon be offloading hundred of its reporters and editors.

The meeting was addressed by NMG Group Editorial Director Joe Ageyo and HR manager Jane Muiruri, a break from the norm when the CEO delivers such chilling news. The meeting invitation was sent to all editorial staff on Saturday 24^th June 2023.

Mr Ageyo, who was appointed to the position in November 2022, revealed NMG has shifted to a centralised news desk for all stories across newspapers, TV and Radio – and this will expectedly leave a number journalists redundant. Mr Ageyo said this is the new business strategy towards a converged and centralised newsroom where NMG will only publish and air commissioned stories that have passed the quality threshold.

Even regional editors will be required to pitch content to the centralised news desk, the News Hub. All stories will be commissioned from the hub, headed by Allan Odhiambo for the newspapers, and Ben Kitili of NTV for broadcast. This kind of operation will tighten the rope around correspondents who earn per article/story since less of their content is likely to be published or aired. It has been indicated that retainers could be “affected” meaning a possible revision downwards.

The layoff has also been necessitated by a reduction in Nation newspaper pagination by four pages, meaning less staff but hoping for better quality. Sections targeted for the chop include revise editors, reporters, online video producer and magazine editors.

All newspapers, Daily Nation, Weekend, Business Daily, The East African and Taifa Leo are run by an army of revise editors, a number of who are set to be relieved of their duties. The newspaper also runs different niche magazines daily, which have a full team from editor, sub-editors and reporters.

Apparently, the narrative for retrenchment has shifted from digital-first quest to convergence. From the look of things, this layoff will be deep. The NMG Human Resources department has already swung into action to provide counselling services to distressed employees. Ms Muiruri said staff will be referred to counselling because it is clear that some of them need to manage the news.

After a meeting with editors, which came as a postmortem of the main staff meeting, HR sent out an email on “Employee Assistance Program” in which it refers employees for professional counselling at no cost through a toll-free line. It has retained Build and Restore Counselling Services, a counselling organisation, through which employees can “manage stress and access post-traumatic counselling services.”

It’s believed Chief Operations Officer, Ms Monica Ndung’u, has been tasked to sweep Nation house clean of employees not contributing optimal value to the company. The last massive cut in NMG staff was in July 2020 due to the effects of COVID-19 on business.

Today’s meeting was so tense that no one was willing to ask any questions, except for some anonymous responses from the virtual audience. Or perhaps employees at NMG have resigned to their fate and developed a thick skin to what has become inevitable.