Realitatea TV – a troubled autumn start, with a mix of insolvency, management changes and layoffs perspectives

Realitatea TV – a TV station with a troubled recent history that involved changing owners and insolvency – has, since September 3rd, a new General Manager, Gabriel Bugnar, that was appointed with the mission to calm down the spirits and start a restructuring process of the TV station.

New General Manager, to come up with a restructuring plan for Realitatea TV; 300 to be fired

Bugnar’s appointment was announced by the special administrator of the company, Florin Bercea.

Gabriel Bugnar is one of the news producers that are part of Realitatea TV’s team for a long time (he’s working there since 2004) and, previous to that, he worked for Prima TV, Pro TV and TVR (Romanian State TV).

After being appointed in the new position, Bugnar said, in an interview for Paginademedia.ro, that his attributions include “convincing some colleagues not to leave and convincing others to make some due payments”.

Also, he will try to solve the problem of the 174 people that were working for Realitatea TV but were employed previously on another company that had no commercial ties with Realitatea Media (owner of Realitatea TV). Gabriel Bugnar explained that he would like to keep the specialists vital and useful for a TV station and have employed at Realitatea TV as many of them as possible.

Bugnar is, in the same time, in charge of drafting and implementing a restructuring plan that will see Realitatea TV’s team reduced to half, from 630 to just 300 people. As he explained, no other Romanian TV has such a large team and cutting off the number of people will also reduce the costs and will eventually help the company (officially in insolvency at the moment) to be more efficient and reduce its debts.

Mihai Tatulici, among the ones that chose to leave Realitatea TV after the new developments

Mihai Tatulici, well known Romanian journalist, quits Realitatea TV, a news station where he worked for 8 years. He didn’t make any comments related to its decision to leave the TV station.

Tatulici started working in TV in 1980, for Romanian State TV. After 1990, he was TVR’s editor in chief, than he helped founding and was general manager at Tele 7abc. In 1995, he founded the Romanian Press Club, which he coordinated as General Manager for 4 years (1997 – 2001). He worked in 1997 and 1998 for Pro TV, than, starting 2004, he was in Realitatea TV’s team.

On the other hand, 3 key professionals in Realitatea TV’s editorial management decided to quit the station starting October: Carmen Ungurean – Editor in Chief Realitatea TV, Madalina Radulescu – Programs Director and Cristi Marin – General Producer.

Their decision was most likely determined by the decision to revoke the attributions of more Editorial responsibles, among which Sorin Kosz, Madalina Radulescu and Carmen Ungureanu.

The mentioned decision was announced by Mura Franculescu, recently appointed Executive Director of Realitatea Media. Franculescu also announced that, as a consequence, coordinating daily editorial activities will be a task assumed by an Editorial Council including Carmen Ghita, Bebe Nicola, Vera Secrieru, Cristi Marin, Dan Duca, Raluca Fintea, Bianca Oanea, Costi Rogozanu, Cristian Nedelcu and Ada Dumitrescu.

After Realitatea Media’s creditors decided to outsource company’s HR, accountability and logistics activites, the creditors of the TV station announced also changing the media sales representatives, replacing Media Consulta International with DVB Media House.