Where there's news, there's a chant

People losing their jobs and livelihoods is never a laughing matter and sadly the press and media industry has been too full of stories about redundancies recently.

Still, one can always rely on that most positive-thinking of demographics - the modern football fan - to shed a little comedy where others see only misery.

Last year Trinity Mirror announced it wanted to move printing of the Liverpool Daily Post and Echo out of the city to Oldham - a town not too far away from the home of Liverpool FC's biggest rivals, Manchester United.

So the inevitable has happened according to the Twitter feed of journalism lecturer and blogger Andy Dickinson:

Good business sense

Difficult times at Trinity Mirror at the moment, with the announcement of nine newspaper closures and job losses yesterday, and accusations from the National Union of Journalists concerning the future of two of its traditional morning papers, the Birmingham Post and Liverpool Daily Post.

The Guardian's Roy Greenslade has published a lengthy post analysing the TM Midlands proposals. Not all journalists will agree with it but it provides a useful counterbalance to the NUJ point of view.

Meanwhile, a correspondent from TM-owned Media Wales emails HTFP to let us know that the company has (in his words) "hit such hard times it is renting out the 5th and 6th floor of its new offices in Cardiff."

We say: good on them. If it helps avoid any further journalist job losses, then renting out unused office space surely makes good business sense. Come to that, there are probably other newspaper publishers who ought to think about doing the same.