Job losses at Omnimedia signal slump

TWO of multimedia company Omnimedia’s ten CD-ROM designers have been made redundant.

The job losses follow 80 redundancies at multimedia publisher First Information Group last month (DW 20 September). First Information’s redundancies included an unknown number of designers.

Both sets of redundancies signal the City’s disenchantment with CD-ROM publishing. “It started with First Information – when one company on the Stock Exchange does badly the others tend to follow,” comments Paul Hodgson, Omnimedia’s marketing manager.

The two redundancies at Omnimedia represent its entire design resource in music CD-ROMs. Hodgson feels that generally CD-ROMs in the music sector are performing poorly.

He is echoed by John Roland, managing director at Wiltshire multimedia firm Mouse Power. “Whizz kids in the City were looking for money-spinners, but it just was not a good investment,” he says.