Outgoing Australian Financial Review Editor Michael Stutchbury has shared his views on the decision of Nine Publishing staff to take strike action in an interview with ABC’s RN Breakfast.
Staff at the company’s print mastheads – the Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, WA Today, Brisbane Times and Australian Financial Review – voted in favour of striking during the first five days of the Paris Olympics on Monday afternoon after hitting an impasse with management over pay conditions, diversity quotas, and protection against the use of artificial intelligence in the newsrooms.
Stutchbury said he understood the decision to strike, but that it wasn’t for him to support the industrial action of journalists.
Australian Financial Review Editor Michael StutchburyCredit: Michael Quelch
“Of course I understand it. I’ve been through quite a lot of redundancies when I first started, like 13 years ago was a period of almost existential questions around the future of the big newspapers in the Fairfax fold, The Financial Review, The Age and the Herald, and went through a lot of redundancies,” Stutchbury said.
“It wasn’t clear what the laws of physics were and the new in the new digital age and there was a lot of downsizing from the old days of print. As I said to my newsroom yesterday, this is really nothing like that.”
He explained that, unlike previous redundancies rounds, the Financial Review “has never been more profitable”.
“We’ve transformed our business model and I think we are an ongoing growth story,” Stutchbury said.
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But Stutchbury continued that it wasn’t uncommon for profitable companies to cut jobs, noting Telstra recently announced extensive job losses, and that factors like the advertising downturn and the loss of Meta money had led to the redundancy decision.
“These are the sort of things that, no one likes it, regrettably come around from time to time.”
Stutchbury also rejected host Patricia Karvelas’ suggestion that Nine’s publishing division is copping a disproportionate number of job losses, with 90 of the 200 job cuts announced coming from the three mastheads.
“I think because the publishing area has an EBA, it has a union, it gets a lot more publicity than other parts of the business.”
Source Agencies
