Number of journalists not in decline, says GMG chairman

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There is not a staffing decline in the journalism industry, the chairman of the Guardian Media Group has said today.

Speaking to a House of Lords Communications Committee, Paul Myners said staffing figures across the industry were not in decline, despite a perceived fall in the number of editorial staff working on British newspapers.

Economic pressures on the industry, Myners said, would drive journalists to work on new platforms rather than forcing them out of the industry.

"If you define journalism in a broader sense I think there's been no decline in journalism - they're just working in a different medium. They're working online, they're working in blogs, they're working on radio, they're working in local television.

"The type of people doing work which might broadly be described as journalistic, may not have necessarily decreased to the extent of the proportion who are working in the newspaper industry."

To prove his point Myners said Guardian Media Group appointed 60 new journalists to its national titles in the last 12 months to meet the needs of a changing readership, which is increasingly moving online.

"Why have we done that? Because the editor really wants to promote our digital content," he added.

Jeremy Dear, general secretary of the National Union of Journalists (NUJ), disagreed with Myners' comments.

He told Journalism.co.uk that despite an increase in journalists working in the UK over the last five years, staff 'are spread ever more thinly across more media'.

Dear said the plight of staff in the newspaper industry should not be overshadowed by increased new media opportunities for journalists.

"There can be no argument that the newspaper industry in particular is suffering from a lack of resources and understaffing," said Dear.

"A smaller number of journalists are under greater pressure to deliver more content, in more formats for more platforms, more pages...the end result is that despite the best efforts of editors and journalists quality journalism is being compromised."

According to the GMG chairman, the proportion of journalists at the Observer and Guardian covering international news has increased 'to reflect the increasing diversity of our readership as a consequence of the web.'

He cited the launch of the Guardian's US website as key to this changing readership, saying more people read the US site than read print editions of the title in the UK.

"We have gone from being a provincial newspaper... to an international, liberal voice on the web," he said. In February Guardian.co.uk recorded 19,519,923 unique users making it the most popular UK newspaper website, according to figures from the Audit Bureau of Circulations Electronic (ABCE) .