Lachlan Murdoch swings axe at TEN

Updated: TEN’s interim CEO Lachlan Murdoch has begun advising staff of cuts within the network following a strategic review of costs.

TV Tonight understands 6:30 with George Negus will continue for 2011, and 38 operations and engineering positions and 22 journalists have been offered voluntary redundancies.

TEN has denied axing any specific shows today, including Sports Tonight, which was reported amongst a list of shows in the firing line.

In an email to staff today Murdoch said TEN’s strategy of being “the low cost network” served it very well for many years, but as the the media landscape becomes increasingly crowded and competitive this remains “very challenging.”

He also described the moves as “a necessary but inevitably painful restructure.”

“In the last few years we have gone from just five free-to-air channels to fifteen different channels. In our metropolitan markets alone Foxtel has added some six hundred thousand subscribers over the last five years, all receiving hundreds of competitive channels. And, of course, it is hard to quantify the impact of IPTV viewing during this time but we do know it is impacting viewing and the effect will only grow, and grow strongly. Our industry has become more fragmented and far more complex than ever before,” he wrote.

“Since 2005 our TV costs have risen forty five percent … or by just under two hundred million dollars. In this same period our ratings and revenue are broadly flat. It is clear to me that over this time we haven’t been investing our costs in all the right areas.

“Furthermore, due to a number of fixed cost increases next year around News, Eleven, and core programming such as MasterChef, without action our costs were going to continue to increase even further.

“In order to arrest this continued increase in costs and to allow us to re-allocate our resources to better compete in the market, I asked our senior managers some ten weeks ago to explore how we can run the business better. We established 20 workstreams across all areas of the business and appointed senior executives to lead rigorous reviews of each area.”

ABC notes TEN is currently looking for expressions of interest in voluntary redundancies – applications are due by July 13, with the company looking to complete the process within three weeks.

News Limited reports Adelaide’s publicity and marketing sector will operate out of Melbourne and Sydney with more redundancies to follow in Adelaide’s production and on-air team.

Sydney is set for the highest number of redundancies.