Australia’s biggest media company, Nine Entertainment, has blamed the “extreme state of disruption” from AI for its decision to cut another 30 newsroom jobs at the Sydney Morning Herald and the Age.
On Tuesday, the managing director of publishing, Tory Maguire, told staff the company was looking to cut “around 30” positions, made up of voluntary and targeted redundancies. Maguire said the exercise was not simply a matter of cutting costs, but was an “evolution” to adapt to structural change.
“In the last 12 months, as we have discussed many, many times at the publishing town halls, we are in an extreme state of disruption because of AI,” she said.
The company has plans to retrain and to hire people for “digital-first, reader-savvy, data-informed roles”.
Maguire said the Australian Financial Review, which won’t be affected by the restructure, is more evolved than the Age and the Sydney Morning Herald in terms of a digital-first approach, as it has had a paywall since 2007.
The announcement came two years after Nine Entertainment cut 200 jobs, including 90 positions from the legacy mastheads and the AFR.
But Maguire said “we are in the middle” of a major disruption caused by AI.
“The internet and social media did not disrupt us as much as … AI,” Maguire said.
According to the Reuters Institute’s Digital News Report 2026, 10% of news consumers around the world use AI chatbots to get their news. For those aged under 35, it climbs to 16%.
There have also been warnings that fewer people are clicking through to news stories from search engines, because Google is giving them an AI summary.
According to research by the University of Sydney, Australian journalism was largely “invisible” in AI-generated news summaries from Microsoft Copilot, which overwhelmingly favours US or European media.
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Nine, the largest locally owned media company is made up of the publishing division, Nine Television, streaming service Stan and the digital division, nine.com.au.
Nine’s digital subscription revenue was down by 6% last year. Maguire said reader revenue stalled for the first time in three years, and the division was under “enormous pressure”, partly due to the popularity of AI search results.
In 2024, job cuts sparked industrial action and resulted in dozens of senior journalists taking voluntary redundancies from Nine’s mastheads.
At the time, Nine said the cost-cutting was necessary after Meta walked away from the news media bargaining code.
Later that year the chief executive, Matt Stanton, said the company was facing $100m in cuts over the next two years.
When Nine merged with Fairfax Media in 2018 a total of 144 jobs were lost.