Nine cuts 30 publishing jobs and blames an 'extreme state of disruption' from AI

Nine has begun a fresh round of redundancies in its publishing division, with up to 30 roles to go across the Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, nine.com.au and print operations, as reported by AdNews and Mumbrella. The Australian Financial Review is excluded from the cuts, which will be a mix of voluntary and targeted redundancies. Affected staff are expected to begin leaving next week.

Nine Publishing managing director Tory Maguire informed staff of the changes in an internal email on Tuesday, framing the cuts as part of the division's shift towards a digital-first future. Her language was notably blunt on the cause. "We are in an extreme state of disruption because of AI," she wrote, a rare on-the-record admission from a major Australian publisher that artificial intelligence is now directly reshaping newsroom headcount.

The timing is uncomfortable. The redundancies come only weeks after Nine signed a content licensing agreement with Microsoft that puts its mastheads' journalism into Copilot, the first deal of its kind for an Australian publisher. Nine positioned that agreement as proof its journalism holds commercial value in the AI era. Staff now face the other side of the same equation, as the traffic and revenue disruption caused by AI search and chat products forces cost reductions in the newsroom producing that journalism.

The cuts also sit inside a broader cost programme. Nine has been working towards a publicly flagged cost-out target and has restructured executive ranks over the past year, while print advertising and referral traffic from platforms continue to decline across the industry.

Why it matters for Australian media and marketing: Nine is the country's largest locally owned publisher, and its publishing arm sets the tone for how Australian media companies respond to AI-driven audience shifts. For advertisers, shrinking newsrooms mean fewer premium editorial environments and more pressure on the inventory that remains. For the wider industry, the pairing of an AI licensing deal with AI-attributed job cuts is the clearest signal yet that licensing revenue is not arriving fast enough to offset what AI is taking away.

Sources: adnews.com.au, mumbrella.com.au