There's never a good time to lose your job, but sympathy levels rise when the axe falls around Christmas. 
Being sacked in December is guaranteed to put a dampener on the festivities, but if execution is stayed until January, chances are there'll be an overloaded credit card to add to the worries.
Express Newspapers announced in the summer that it wanted to reduce its 650-strong editorial workforce to 450. Staff were invited to apply for redundancy and told that if too few came forward by the end of August, sackings would follow. 
In October, parent company Northern and Shell issued annual results showing that it had turned a £5.6m loss to an operating profit of £37m. The print and publishing arm had seen a threefold increase in profits to £33m, but the redundancy programme - which should have been completed two months earlier - would continue.
A further deadline for applications was set at December 15, but that day came and went with the company reportedly still well short of the 200 volunteers it wanted. Journalists now have until January 1 to decide whether to jump or risk being pushed. Should make for some interesting conversations over the turkey.

While Express journalists seem eager to stay aboard, picture staff at the Times appear to be more than willing to jump ship.
Last week's Gorkana jobs register included listings for a news picture editor, two assistant picture editors and a picture researcher. The ad for the top job offers a "competitive" salary for whoever ends up leading a department that is made up of "professional, energetic and creative journalists".  It continues: 

To see such a plum Fleet Street job advertised is unusual, to see four senior posts in the same department up for grabs suggests carelessness somewhere.
The desk was pared down in the redundancy round at the end of 2011 and the past few months have seen the departures of a stream of professional, energetic and creative journalists, including the award-winning photographers Chris Harris and Pete Nicholls.
The picture editor Sue Connolly and her deputy Lizzy Orcutt were invited to apply for redefined jobs, which resulted in Orcutt's departure. Connolly is now also an ex-Times journalist, as are commissioning editor Paul Bellsham, online picture editor Elizabeth Hanna, and several staffers and regular casuals who worked on the home, business and foreign desks. 
SubScribe understands that editor John Witherow has firm ideas about pictures and that his choices can be expensive. If the department were to remain in budget economies had to be made elsewhere. Desk staff were asked to reapply for their jobs - with cuts of up to 30% in their salaries. Several decided to walk rather than go through such a process. Hence the recruitment flurry.
The management approach sounds harsh, but it has created openings that may embolden some talented and creative people to take the Express payoff and head upstream from Blackfriars to London Bridge. For those who are more hesitant, the Times ad offers further reassurance:

And just in case you were tempted to scoff at the predilection for woodland scenes and ballerinas, it's worth remembering that The Times is the one paper that is putting on sales month by month. It has also emerged from the first half of the awards season with its arms full of trophies.
So it must be doing something right. Even if it's not wo/man management.
As one long-serving journalist not known for a positive view of life in the newsroom said: 

Men with machine guns set out on a mission. They are heading for a school where they intend to kill as many pupils as they can. They achieve their aim with a death toll of 132 children - and a teacher is burnt alive for good measure. 
By any yardstick this is a big story. But not, to judge from today's front pages, as big as the NHS populating hospital wards with foreign nurses or slightly cheaper petrol. Indeed, the possibility of life on Mars is more compelling for the Telegraph than the real loss of life on Earth.
The Guardian alone cleared its front page for the massacre in Pakistan. The Independent and Sun came close with truncated puffs. Only six of the ten front pages here splash on the story - and one of those is the Daily Star having a pop at Russell Brand next to a picture of a woman in bra, knickers, stockings and suspenders. Very appropriate.

What is the thinking here? That the story had been 'on the news all day' and so seemed old? That British newspaper readers care for nothing but their pockets or the hordes of foreigners invading their lives? 
The Mail is unfathomable - a strip headline across the bottom (under a picture of Joan Collins) that is half the depth of the puff to a rant about the possibility that Wimbledon might not be on BBC television next year.
Ah yes, Wimbledon. The story that pushed the Sydney siege downpage on The Times's front yesterday. Another baffling news day.
Why don't our papers care about these children? Why didn't - and don't - they care about the girls kidnapped by Boko Haram last April. There were 276 of them. Stolen in the middle of the night from their school dormitories. It took the best part of three weeks for our newspapers to wake up to the story. Videos and a few escapes created a spark of interest, but it soon fizzled out. There were rumours that the girls were to be released six months after the kidnappings, but these came to nought. So here we are, 247 days later and 219 are still missing. Campaigners still tweet #bringbackourgirls, but what else is happening? They will probably feature in the 2014 retrospectives and that'll be about it until the anniversary next spring. 

It wasn't always like this. Everyone gave saturation coverage to the children of Beslan ten years ago. We used to pride ourselves on our outward-looking attitude, mocking the Americans for being insular - "is there a bridge to London?"  Now the whitetops and the Telegraph don't seem to care about the misfortunes of others unless they can pin a Union Flag to the story: British victims in the case of air crashes or the Ebola epidemic; "We're next on the list" alarmism when there's a terrorist attack. 
SubScribe was surprised to see the Mirror dilute its front with the petrol story, an RAC prediction that could easily have been despatched to an inside page. The Mirror is the redtop with a conscience, the Sun the one with the heart. 

Yes. The Sun. The paper and its journalists have had a rotten ride over the past four years, mostly at the hands of people who would never dream of opening the paper. There has been a tendency for front pages to roam down the sleazy Star route of women bursting out of bras and David Dinsmore doesn't show any sign of heeding the big boss's hints or bowing to the "No More Page 3" campaigners. But look beyond that and you find a paper that cares about people. 
Don't laugh. Try reading it. 
It covers serious stories; it tries to explain foreign issues and political arguments in plain English. The advice given in its health and diet pages is solid and sensible. The "Something for the Weekend" section offers class arts coverage that isn't about Miley Cyrus twerking or a Kardashian bum.
And today it got the front end spot on. A thoughtful headline, a non-gory picture on page 1, immediately followed by a spread, relegating page 3 to page 5. Except it wasn't Rachel from Woking flashing her boobs. It was Naomi Campbell in underwear. Was the absence of bare breasts deliberate? Probably not, but it was fortuitous.

Elsewhere, the level of coverage of the Peshawar killings was dispiriting. Given the events in that part of the world over the past decade, there is no shortage of experts to analyse the events. But what about people on the ground? Everyone is paring back their foreign coverage, bringing home - or rather sacking - their foreign correspondents.
On days like today it shows.
SubScribe Twitter puts papers to shame on Nigerian kidnap
Papers wake up to Ebola - and panic
Don't underestimate readers' compassion

This is the story of a "respected and trusted" reporter.
In 2010 this journalist wrote two "back of the book" stories for the News of the World about the life the James Bulger killer Jon Venables was living in jail.
The details of his  existence came from a corrupt prison officer, who over a period of time was paid £40,000 for stories about inmates.
The News of the World stories, were "not very sensitive revelations", "only a small part of the total" the prison officer sold and the material was "mainly in the public domain". 
In writing the stories, our respected reporter was "trying their best to satisfy a very demanding boss in a ruthlessly competitive industry".
The reporter was "of good character" and "had not tried to corrupt" the prison officer. A "range of people from diverse walks of life" had offered "quite outstanding" references.
The journalist was also  "respected and trusted by police" as a senior crime reporter to the extent of being "trusted with confidential information".
In 2011, however, this reporter was arrested and then spent 19 months on police bail before being charged with conspiracy to commit misconduct in a pubic office. 
This trusted and respected reporter, who "has two young children to support", has not worked in journalism since the News of the World closed and received no financial help from their employer to defend themselves.
The matter had been "hanging over the head" of the journalist for "a few days short of three years" and their "life had been on hold" all that time.

Yesterday this reporter was given a suspended six-month prison sentence by Judge Wide at the Old Bailey. The judge also ordered the journalist to do 150 hours of unpaid work and to accept a tagged curfew from 6pm to 7am every night for three months "as a daily reminder of how close to prison you came".

The journalist had argued that it was in the public interest for people to know about the life Venables was leading, which included having a personal trainer and being given board games:

The judge did not accept that, however, or that the journalist was unaware that the source of the stories was a prison officer. "You claim to have been acting conscientiously in the public interest. I don't accept that," he said "You knew from the start Chapman was doing it for the money. Your main concern was to make sure the News of the World paid him enough to get the next big one." 

Journalists have to obey the law. There is little public sympathy for those in an industry whose task is to expose wrongdoing who get caught misbehaving themselves.
But in an environment in which paying for information was routine, where neither the editors' code nor McNae, the journalists' legal bible, mentioned a word about it being illegal to pay public officials, did this reporter deserve to be made an example of in this way?
To put this sentence into context, look at the phone hacking trial. The private investigator Glen Mulcaire was also given a suspended six-month sentence, coupled with 200 hours of community service, for hacking hundreds of phones and two journalists who conspired with him were given suspended sentences with similar community service orders.
I merely ask: Was justice served at the Central Criminal Court yesterday?

Oh, by the way, all those quotes in grey italics. They were spoken by the judge.

This is Nick Parker in a Lee Thompson photograph taken shortly after a Hamas rocket attack destroyed two homes in the Israeli town of Sderot. 
Parkier is the Sun's chief foreign correspondent and in a 26-year career with the paper he has reported from Lockerbie, Iraq, Afghanistan, Bali and Beslan. 
He has not, however, worked for 34 months because he has been suspended on police bail since his arrest in February 2012 in the extended aftermath of the phone hacking scandal.
Today he is a convicted criminal, having been found guilty of handling a stolen mobile phone belonging to the Labour MP Siobhan McDonagh. Sentencing him to three months' imprisonment, suspended for a year, Judge Worsley told him:  "You were prepared to behave dishonestly in order to get a story...You over-stepped the line between investigate journalism and breaking the law."
This judgment suggests that any journalist offered information in less-than-straightforward circumstances must gamble on whether it is likely to be of public interest without even looking at it. 
That is not the same as making a decision on whether to accept the material by balancing its importance against the risk of prosecution. 
In 2009, James Harding and Rebekah Brooks were offered tapes detailing every MP's expenses claims. They looked at them, considered the issue of dealing in stolen goods, and turned them down. The material was offered to the Daily Telegraph, which paid £110,000 for it, and we all know the rest of that story.

Harding and Brooks, who knew the tapes were stolen and that they would have to pay to publish them, were guilty of criminally stupid journalistic judgment, but I have never heard anyone suggest that they were guilty of a crime.
Yet they behaved in almost exactly the same way as Parker: 
He knew the phone was stolen, he was told that it contained a text about bribery and he agreed to pay Michael Ankers, the student who had turned up with the BlackBerry, £10,000 if the story worked out.  
Like Harding and Brooks, he looked at the material, decided against using it, and returned it to the source. 

No one would today argue that the publication of MPs' expenses was anything other than in the public interest. Supposing the stolen (or found on the Underground) phone had contained evidence of MPs being involved in bribery. Would that not also have been in the public interest?

Yet today Parker is a criminal for looking to see if that were the case.
This means that journalists will be ever more circumspect about sources and that a whistleblower with important issues to raise may be shown the door if they don't "look right" or because an editor dares not risk checking out what they have to share. 
This Government has promised to look after whistleblowers, but the stream of people sacked or hounded out of their jobs for telling the truth flows unabated. 
Michael Ankers was not an honourable source trying to right a wrong, but are we to presume that every young man who says he has a story must be a chancer on the make and reject their material without a single, let alone a second, glance?

In an editor's blog for Press Gazette, Dominic Ponsford draws a parallel with the news that Metropolitan Police held on to 1,700 phone records to which they knew they were not entitled for seven months before returning them. It is well worth reading, which you can do here.