Tamedia staff rally in Zurich against planned redundancies

More than 400 people gathered outside Tamedia’s Zurich headquarters on October 20, turning the publisher’s planned newsroom redundancies into a public protest. Employees, media professionals and readers called on the Swiss media group to halt the cuts.

Tamedia editorial teams organised the rally at the company’s main building. The crowd included staff from French-speaking Switzerland, where newsroom colleagues had expressed solidarity with the Zurich protest. Some travelled to the city to join it.

Zurich’s mayor also attended in support. He said he still reads the newspapers every morning, lending the protest backing from the city’s political leadership as well as from within the media industry.

The rally followed Tamedia’s announcement that it would remove 34 full-time posts from news editorial teams in German-speaking and French-speaking Switzerland. The reductions affect 41 staff members. Protesters urged management to stop the planned redundancies and address the changes through consultation with employees in both language regions.

The planned cuts remove 34 full-time posts and affect 41 people, according to the announced restructuring. The figures describe different measures: the number of positions being cut and the number of staff members whose jobs are affected.

The reductions cover Tamedia news editorial teams in both German-speaking and French-speaking Switzerland. That scope drew colleagues from the French-speaking region into the Zurich protest, where they joined the staff-organised rally and showed solidarity with their newsroom peers.

Employees are asking management to hold a consultation process across the two language regions. They want voluntary redundancies to be taken into account as part of that process. Their demand places the focus on how the company handles the announced cuts, as well as on the scale of the reductions.

The protest also brought together people beyond Tamedia’s workforce. Other media professionals and readers joined employees outside the building, making the planned newsroom changes a subject of public concern. The rally’s organisers framed their appeal around the future of editorial work and called for the company to invest in journalism produced by human reporters.

Tamedia’s employees accuse management of shifting responsibility for the company’s difficulties onto staff. At the rally, editorial teams said the workforce was being made to bear the consequences of poor decisions and failed strategies.

That criticism shaped the staff’s appeal for a halt to the redundancies. Their call was not limited to opposing job losses: employees also asked for a consultation process in German-speaking and French-speaking Switzerland, with voluntary departures considered. They urged the publisher to invest in journalism produced by people.

The mayor of Zurich backed the protest and spoke about his own daily newspaper-reading habit. Another speaker, identified as Golta and described as a former journalist, said he wanted to keep reading articles produced by local media professionals rather than material generated by AI agents.

Those remarks gave the demonstration a clear editorial focus. The participants linked job security to the presence of professional journalists producing local reporting. The rally brought that argument to the publisher’s doorstep, with staff, readers and other media workers standing together against the planned reductions.

Tamedia staff want management to consult employees in both German-speaking and French-speaking Switzerland before proceeding with the cuts. Their proposal asks the company to consider voluntary redundancies and to invest in journalism produced by people.

The rally made those demands in front of the publisher’s main Zurich building, with support from colleagues in French-speaking Switzerland and from the city’s mayor. More than 400 employees, media professionals and readers attended, according to the editorial teams that organised the event.

For now, the announced plan remains the point of dispute: 34 full-time posts are due to go, affecting 41 staff members in the news editorial teams. Staff members have called for the reductions to be halted while consultation takes place. Their appeal puts the next steps in management’s hands and asks the company to consider alternatives to compulsory job losses.

The protest also underscored how the cuts reach beyond one newsroom. Employees from two language regions are involved, while readers and other media workers joined them in Zurich. The staff’s campaign will now focus on pressing for consultation and for voluntary departures to be included in the process.