A Nine building
(Image: AAP/Luis Ascui)

Nine’s Pedestrian Group has earmarked “a number” of redundancies as its CEO plots changes to the business in the face of a soft advertising market. 

The announcement was made in a Slack message to staff on Wednesday, after department heads briefed the teams impacted by the changes. CEO Matt Rowley withheld the “small number” of jobs that had been axed and the names of those affected.

Crikey understands at least six jobs have been scratched, with one cut to the group’s editorial leadership team. The group has since listed job postings on LinkedIn, including editorial roles for its recently launched cryptocurrency publication, The Chainsaw, whose editors recently stepped down after the site became embroiled in scandal earlier this year.

Rowley said further job cuts were not expected in the near term: “Changes like these are never easy — the affected people are all awesome humans and we thank them for their time here.”

A spokesperson for Nine declined to comment. 

The job cuts come as other media companies move to trim their expenses heading into the second financial quarter, with a view to finalising all redundancies and cost-cutting activities before the end of the financial year. 

Last week, management at News Corp Australia asked editors to put forward up to 40 editorial jobs for redundancy as part of a move to cut up to 200 people across the business in Australia. 

Job cuts at News Corp Australia come as part of a global cost-cutting drive, after a 30% earnings dip in February prompted News Corp chief executive Robert Thomson to announce a 5% headcount reduction. 

“It’s not something you want to do, but it’s something you have to do in these circumstances to build on what is [a] robust platform,” he told a Morgan Stanley conference in early March. 

In the same week News Corp staff were warned local jobs were on the line, Australian Community Media announced it would shut four major regional news outlets across Western Australia’s south-west. The outlets set to go include the Mandurah Mail, the Augusta-Margaret River Mail, the Bunbury Mail, and the Busselton-Dunsborough Mail. 

The mastheads will stop publishing at the end of April, according to a letter sent to staff last week, unless the company is able to find a buyer. If not, they and the jobs that come with them would be heavily consolidated, if not folded altogether.