Sir Ray Tindle has sweetened the bonus scheme for his newspaper group’s 700 staff after calling an end to a torrid seven years for the beleaguered local newspaper industry.
The chairman of Tindle Newspapers, which publishes 200 titles, said he has made a “one-off” revision to the company’s bonus scheme in light of a boost in profitability in the six months to the end of October.
At the top level, full time employees could get up to £600 each – the maximum under the previous scheme was £400.
The minimum payable will continue to be £150.
“The changes now introduced into Tindle Newspapers Limited’s performance scheme coincide with a period which many will claim will see the ending of this seven-year recession,” said the 89-year-old. “This has been the longest and deepest recession I’ve been through in my long newspaper career.”
Tindle said that in the last “seven long drab years”, the publisher has launched 20 new local newspapers to replace lost revenue and raise profile.
“What we can say at this point is that local newspapers have put up a great performance in difficult circumstances,” he said. “We have come through these years without borrowing a single penny, without making a single journalist compulsorily redundant and without closing a single main title nor missing a single edition.”
The publisher, which employed 690 staff as of the end of March last year, said the bonus scheme will cost at least £100,000 and potentially more than £500,000.
Tindle Newspapers made a pre-tax profit of £1.93m in the year to the end of March 2014, according to the most recent publicly available documents, up from £1.38m in the previous year.
The company managed to keep revenues almost flat year-on-year at £34.5m.
In October, Tindle Newspapers announced it would give wage rises to all its staff for the second successive year. Full-timers with at least 12 months service got £500 increases, with pro-rata increases for part-timers.
