Management at the Manchester Evening News group, which is owned by the Guardian, want to make nearly 80 journalists redundant - roughly a third of its editorial staff - and close all the offices of its Greater Manchester weekly newspapers, thereby depriving Manchester's population of its local voice.
These are savage cuts - the biggest of their type in the country - and an assault on local democracy that will tear apart the fabric of Manchester's community news.
The newspapers affected are:
Accrington Observer
Oldham Advertiser
North and East Manchester Advertiser
Rossendale Free Press
Middleton and North Manchester Guardian
Tameside Advertiser and the Glossop Advertiser
South Manchester Reporter
Stockport Express and Times
Salford Advertiser and the Prestwich and Whitefield Advertiser
Macclesfield Express and Times and the Poynton Times
Wilmslow Express
Trafford Metro News
Rochdale Observer
Heywood Advertiser
The plans would mean all weekly papers in the MEN group, from as far north as Accrington to as far south as Wilmslow, would be based at its Deansgate office in central Manchester. Journalists would be expected to cover their areas from Manchester and there would be nowhere for local people to drop into in their local area.
Inevitably this will mean that the quality of Manchester's local papers will suffer; journalists will no longer be able to get a grasp on local issues and will rarely, if ever, be able to cover council meetings or court cases - a role which is an intrinsic part of local democracy.
This is devastating not only for the staff involved, but for Greater Manchester as a whole, and must be fought.
The cuts are being done in the name of the Scott Trust, which was set up to safeguard the Guardian's liberal principles in perpetuity. Strangling Manchester's newspapers and so suffocating the region's democracy is not the way to go about preserving those principles.