The Daily Monitor newsroom in Namuwongo. Photo: Edgar R. Batte/Uganda Business News Nation Media Group Uganda, the media company, plans to dismiss staff as part of a restructuring seeking to “accelerate our digital transformation” and in response to effects of the Covid-19 pandemic.
The company said in an email to staff that its “re-engineering” will require “re-tooling and resourcing within the NMGU operation with relevant skill sets critical for success in the new business environment.
“Regrettably, it will also result in a reduction of our workforce effective Wednesday, 31 March 2021,” the email added.
This website was unable to establish how many employees will be affected by the cuts, with a source saying that different departments within the country’s second largest media company will be affected.
The restructuring comes less than a year after one of the company’s divisions, Monitor Publications Limited, reduced salaries of employees in response to a fall in revenue caused by the coronavirus outbreak.
“During this difficult period [the Covid-19 pandemic], management has implemented several cost-saving interventions to enable business continuity… [but] the business has continued to bear the brunt of the pandemic,” the email said.
The email to staff from NMG Uganda’s managing director, Tony Glencross, noted that the company intends to “radically change our business model for all our media platforms from traditional advertising to content-driven revenue” during the restructuring.
NMG Uganda said the exercise will result in “establishing leadership in the mobile/digital landscape in Uganda while exploring new revenue streams in the experiential and technology space.”
This is the latest restructuring in what has been, by any measure, Nation Media Uganda’s long journey to “digital transformation”. In 2017, it announced that its “content generation platforms will collaborate more closely, innovate together and eventually converge into a single newsroom-cum-content hub.”
One year later, Mr Glencross said the groups’ operations would consolidate some editorial and human resource departments (a process that also saw top editors bestowed with grandiose titles, although sanity has since prevailed). This also resulted in retrenchments.
In any case, the adjustments are unavoidable for traditional media organisations like the Nation Media Group. The largest audiences are online, whether on computer browsers or smartphone apps. Media businesses are now multi-platform and strategies must reflect that, in addition to an “online-first” mindset.Such restructuring – which the Nation Media Group has always been at the forefront of in Uganda, it must be admitted – is not just a reaction to changes in the publics’ […]