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Express owner wants more redundancies
150 journalists left since October and Desmond wants more

Former football players and managers yesterday hit-out at billionaire newspaper owner Richard Desmond for planning to slash the number of Daily Express sports reporting staff from nine to six.

Desmond wants to save £14 million a year and is hoping to cut journalist staff across all four Express newspaper titles by a third.

The papers have already stopped sending reporters to cover Formula One races and major tennis tournaments abroad and with further redundancies in the pipeline, there is unlikely to be specialist writers covering sports such as cricket, golf or boxing.

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