"It sometimes feels a bit eerie in here," says Brian Gomm, the 57-year-old news editor of the Leigh Journal. You can see his point: he and a part-time colleague go about their business in an office that used to house six people. They're surrounded by cold and empty rooms. On the ground floor is a recently deserted work space formerly used by six ad reps whose jobs have now been "centralised", and next to them is a bare back-room where four production staff once worked. The phone trills every half-hour or so, but that's about it: for the HQ of a newspaper, it seems absurdly quiet
But actually what sums its plight up is this little insight
The Journal has a website, put together at Newsquest's Bolton office: a pretty thorough spread of news, travel updates....... but in the context of his paper's almost ludicrously low staff numbers, an imagined world of video reports, podcasts, and possible hook-ups with new local TV networks seems so far-off as to look almost exotic
