Nick McGowan-Lowe, national organiser for Scotland at the National Union of Journalists, described the move to cut the Aberdeen programme as an act of “cultural vandalism”.<\/p>\n
He accused the company of financial mismanagement and of making a “rushed through, panicked” decision.<\/p>\n
“This does not give the impression of a company who is thinking long term,” he told MSPs on Holyrood’s culture committee. <\/p>\n
“They’re doing a knee-jerk reaction and what they are proposing is going to have a catastrophic effect on local democracy and the culture of the north east if it is allowed to go through.”<\/p>\n
STV recently signed a 10-year deal for north and central Scotland TV licences, which came into force in January.<\/p>\n
However, the company is now seeking to amend that deal so it can share material from both regions.<\/p>\n
Mr McGowan-Lowe likened cutting spending while setting up a new radio station to “buying a sports car and then trying to pay less on the mortgage to afford it”.<\/p>\n
He added that he was “astonished” STV was not reviewing its plans for a radio station.<\/p>\n
Paul McManus, negotiations officer at Bectu, said STV had spent millions of pounds on bonuses for senior executives, refurbished studios and on the radio station.<\/p>\n
He said committing to such outlay shortly before announcing major cuts was not “rational”. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Nick McGowan-Lowe, national organiser for Scotland at the National Union of Journalists, described the move to cut the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":67754,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[156,111,139,69,437],"class_list":{"0":"post-67753","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-tv","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-new-zealand","10":"tag-newzealand","11":"tag-nz","12":"tag-tv"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67753","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=67753"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67753\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/67754"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=67753"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=67753"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=67753"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}