Nine Entertainment, Australia’s largest locally owned media company, will cut around 30 newsroom jobs at the Sydney Morning Herald and the Age, blaming what its publishing chief called an “extreme state of disruption” caused by AI.
Tory Maguire, Nine’s managing director of publishing, delivered the news to staff on Tuesday, according to reporting from The Guardian. The reductions will come through a mix of voluntary and targeted redundancies. Maguire framed the move as an evolution rather than a straight cost cut, though financial pressure is evident.
“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 told staff.
Maguire put AI ahead of every prior shock the industry has absorbed. The internet and social media, she said, did not disrupt the business as much as AI is now.
The numbers behind that claim are becoming clearer. The Reuters Institute’s Digital News Report 2026 found 10% of news consumers worldwide now use AI chatbots to get their news, rising to 16% among people under 35. Meanwhile, fewer readers are clicking through from search engines, because Google increasingly answers queries with its own AI summaries instead of sending traffic to publishers.
Australian outlets face a compounding problem. Research from the University of Sydney found local journalism was largely invisible in AI-generated news summaries produced by Microsoft Copilot, which overwhelmingly surfaced US and European sources instead.
Nine’s own financials reflect the squeeze. Digital subscription revenue fell 6% last year, and Maguire said reader revenue stalled for the first time in three years, with the division under enormous pressure partly due to the popularity of AI search results. The company says it plans to retrain existing staff and hire for what it describes as digital-first, reader-savvy, data-informed roles.
The Australian Financial Review is exempt from this pressure. Maguire credited its head start, pointing to a paywall it has run since 2007, as evidence the AFR is further along in adapting than the two legacy mastheads.
This is not an isolated incident. Two years ago Nine cut 200 jobs, including 90 from the mastheads and the AFR, and in 2024 chief executive Matt Stanton warned of $100m in cuts over two years. That earlier round, tied to Meta abandoning the news media bargaining code, triggered industrial action and a wave of senior departures. The merger with Fairfax Media in 2018 shed another 144 roles.
For newsrooms elsewhere, the pattern here is worth watching closely. Publishers are now naming AI not as a future risk but as the immediate cause of headcount decisions, and the referral economy that funded much of digital journalism is thinning fast.
Whether retraining and new digital roles can offset the loss of search and social traffic is the open question. Nine is betting they can. The next set of subscription numbers will show whether that bet is paying off.
