By my calculations, November brought 901 reported job losses in UK-based news media. (You can take a look at the full roll call of misery here, on Google Docs). 

The number of jobs lost was similar to July and September. Both were bad months. But what’s different about November is the sheer number of employers reportedly making redundancies.

In July, there were 7. In September, there were 9. But during November, 14 separate organisations were cited in reports about redundancies at Press Gazette and elsewhere.

Perhaps Press Gazette et al are just becoming more aggressive about reporting job losses. But I doubt it.

Of course, the numbers you see here underestimate — quite significantly — what’s actually occurring on the ground. Job losses at small publishing operations don’t get reported.  Unfilled vacancies are rarely reported, either.

A few other things I should point out:

1) The figures used here include redundancies in editorial, sales, admin and support (it’s not easy to disentangle editorial job losses from the rest).

2) These are UK job losses only.

3) There have been a few slight revisions to previous months’ figures — based on updated information.

4) Where possible, I’m adding reportedly unfilled vacancies to the totals. This makes sense if only because there’s little prospect of any of those vacancies being filled soon.

Footnote 1: The NUJ has been doing some number-crunching of its own. A few days back, the union suggested:

more than 500 journalists posts have been axed or left unfilled at local newspaper groups since June. More than 30 local newspaper offices have been closed and 50-plus titles closed. 

Footnote 2: This recent forecast outstrips even my substantial pessimism:

“We calculated the total jobs in the media in the UK at about 400,000. That includes newspapers, radio, TV, production companies, advertising, and so on, at the end of 2007.

“Between the beginning of 2008 and 2013 we’re expecting half of those jobs to go. The big employers are the regional press, magazines, local advertising sales. Real numbers are in print.”

Who’s talking? It’s Clair Enders, the founder of Enders Analysis.

As regular readers of this blog will know, Enders — more commonly known as analysts of the tech and telecoms markets — has published a series of highly pessimistic forecasts for media markets in the past few months.

This feels like the most extreme yet. Unfortunately, it’s hard to dismiss the Enders view. For one thing, the firm has a rock-solid reputation in its core markets.

For another, they’ve also got some sectoral experience on board. Douglas McCabe, formerly a director at Fish4 and now an analyst at Enders, has presumably contributed to these forecasts.

The Enders view is much grimmer than the existing consensus. That said, pessimism has been a sure route to successful predictions so far in this recession.