Amid what up until recently was considered a newsprint crisis, commercial TV stations in Norway take drastic budget measures, of which TVNorge’s (TVNorway) appears overly dramatic, as it on Monday announced the shut down of its news, sports and weather forecast department, effective by the end of this year. The channel’s local programming for the Oslo area, OsloTV, is affected, too, taking effect on 19 June this year.
The decision won’t affect the number two commercial channel’s presenters, but third party provider Mastiff, in charge of content and production, took quite a blow. Moreover, the country’s leading commercial TV channel, TV 2′s CEO Alf Hildrum announced an NOK 70 million cost reduction today, saying:
“We may paradoxically find ourselves in a position where the [state-owned] Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation remains the sole TV news provider, ” which may very well be the case, if TV 2 bails out of the news market, too, as Norwegian TV news today consists of just TV 2 and the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation, NRK.
Although Norwegian finances, in comparison, have been fairly unaffected by the global downturn, we’ve already seen massive lay-offs in the newspaper business, including two newspapers going out of business altogether, which, I’m afraid, is far from the end of it.
Being a freelance journalist myself, I’m seriously considering an imminent career move – as far away from journalism as I can possibly get, unless you have an offer that I simply cannot refuse, to paraphrase a certain Don. I’m certainly open for suggestions, for which purpose I’ll even provide a contact form:
In conclusion, and as a greeting to worried colleagues:
Dear friends, run for your lives. It’s every man for himself!
In all honesty, if the NYT struggles, who are we to think we’ll not?
Photo: TV Norge news, sports and weather presenters (photo from TVNorge).