IN&M profits fall on redundancy costs

INDEPENDENT News & Media’s (IN&M) first-half profits slipped by 13% after the publisher took a €29 million charge to cover the cost of hundreds of job losses.

The company is cutting nearly 580 jobs from its newspaper titles in Ireland, Australia and Britain. More than 450 people have left and it expects the rest to go by the end of the year. IN&M is outsourcing a number of production functions including page design and sub-editing.

The company was hit with an exceptional charge of €29m in the first six months of the year and the cost for the remaining redundancies will be in the region of €16m.