Divya Bhaskar part of Bhaskar group of publication is facing a serious credibility crisis. It is not the credibility of its news content. It is the case of credibility crisis in its human resource management. It is the result of lay off of scores of employees in the last one fortnight and the manner it has been done.
The crisis can be gauged from the mail that its state editor Ajay Umath and Ashwini Agrawal have jointly written to the staff. The letter assures that no journalist staff will be retrenched. The mail was sent to unit heads who read it out to the staff.
The management, on the other hand, claims that this is not retrenchment but result of the restructuring of various editions to make the chain of the newspapers more efficient and viable.
No one has clear idea of the retrenchment as there are many editions and the management is tight lipped about the terror number. Divya Bhaskar introduced concept of city pull out and recruited lot of staff for news gathering to fill these pull out with local shades. However, the experiment turned out to be a misadventure.
But this has led to the ouster of the staff which was recruited for these pull outs. This has sent shock waves in the staff as it feels the heat of ruthless butchery. Without giving any hint, staff is handed over one month salary as a notice period and asked not to come any more. Certainly it is an action that explains what bolt from the blue means.
Many have been thrown out from its group publication DB gold.
Some top managers of Divya Bhaskar have coined a very attractive expression- we are for cost cuts and job cuts. And they have this model of cost cuts also. Contribution amount of a number of columnists has been reduced in different ways. For example, Prakash Shah a senior activist journalist who used to write an article every day for the edit page has been asked to write once a week only. The long list of columnist affected by cost cut operation also include Bejan Daruwala, paper back astrologer who can been seen in the display window of major bookshops.
Divya Bhaskar created market hype by inflating everything. It recruited staff with salaries none imagined in Gujarati journalism and it used every marketing trick to rope in hawkers. It opened several distribution centers for the facility of hawkers. Now, it has announced winding up of many and to restrict itself to traditional four centers as was earlier.
Certainly, meltdown makes all a fluid of one kind with only two expressions cost cuts and job cuts!