Fairfax Media to cut 1,900 jobs in Australia Australia's Fairfax Media, publisher of some of the country's leading newspapers, said it will restructure its top titles. Photograph: Daniel Munoz/Reuters One of Australia's oldest newspaper groups, Fairfax Media, has announced major job cuts at its main Sydney and Melbourne newspapers in what has been described by management as a "landmark" event at the group. Nineteen hundred jobs will be cut over three years in a move that will see the Sydney Morning Herald and Melbourne Age change from broadsheet to tabloid-sized papers in 2013. Up to 20% of job cuts are thought to be in editorial roles. A partial pay wall will be introduced on both titles next year. Some content will remain free as with Fairfax's other main paper, the Australian Financial Review. The cuts also include the closure of the company's main printing presses in Sydney and Melbourne by 2014. The state-of-the-art press in Melbourne was opened less than a decade ago. As well as cuts in Sydney and Melbourne, jobs are also expected to go in Canberra, Brisbane and Perth. "No one should be in any doubt that we are operating in very challenging times," said Fairfax's chief executive and managing director, Greg Hywood. Readers' behaviours have changed and will not change back. As a result we are taking decisive action to fundamentally change the way we do business. The total readership of the SMH and the Age has increased from 5.5m to 7.2m in the past five years but 77% of those readers are online. The federal communications minister, Stephen Conroy, said the changes were a consequence of the rising power of the internet. "The internet will continue its march and sectors that were profitable previously are going to continue to struggle as the internet cannibalises different parts of the economy," he said. It's not something you can stop, it's something that will continue. Journalists at Fairfax fear the job cuts will have a major impact on the quality of journalism. "We certainly feel on the editorial floor like it's the perfect storm because we're seeing around a quarter of our numbers reduced and possibly within a 60-90 day time frame and that's going to be particularly hard to achieve because we already feel like we're running on the smell of an oily rag," said Stuart Washington, a journalist on the Sydney Morning Herald. Union representatives are seeking urgent meetings with Fairfax Media management to clarify the details of Monday's announcement. "Readers and employees alike are entitled to know precisely how Fairfax Media intends to ensure that these two great mastheads will continue to produce quality journalism when fewer journalists are left to actually hunt out news stories," said Paul Murphy, the acting federal secretary of the Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance. The cuts at Fairfax follow two previous rounds of redundancies as well as outsourcing of subediting jobs at two of its main regional newspapers. Andrea Carson, a former journalist with the Age newspaper, whose PhD research looks at the future of broadsheet newspapers, called Monday's announcement "historic." "One of the strategies that has been rumoured is that both the Sydney Morning Herald and the Age will eventually be completely online," she said. This is probably the first of a number of steps that could make that happen. Carson said there were real concerns about the impact of the changes on the quality of journalism. "There's going to be more sharing of resources across geographies and across the mastheads which means instead of getting three stories coming out of Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne, you'll get one journalist writing one story, further consolidating perspectives and viewpoints available to readers," she said. Australia already has one of the highest concentrations of media ownership in the country, with around 90% of newspaper readership being shared by Fairfax Media and Rupert Murdoch's News Limited papers (the Murdoch press has around 70% of readership). Monday's cuts at Fairfax reflect the company's dwindling revenue. Five years ago, its share price was around $5.00. Today it's 65 cents, rising 8% after the restructuring announcement. The company was recently the subject of a share raid by the world's richest woman, Australian mining magnate Gina Rinehart. In February, she bought just under around 13% of the company, raising that stake to 18.6% last week.