The editor-in-chief of the Australian Financial Review, Michael Stutchbury, will step down after 13 years in the role, amid a shake-up at Nine Entertainment that will see 200 jobs cut across the media company.
Stutchbury, 67, will be replaced next month by James Chessell, the former executive editor of the Sydney Morning Herald and the Age.
Nine Entertainment’s managing director of publishing, Tory Maguire, said Stutchbury had guided the Financial Review through enormous changes in technology and consumer behaviour.
Journalists at the Financial Review – and the Age and the Sydney Morning Herald – face looming cuts of up to 90 jobs in the publishing division.
Earlier this month the company’s chief executive, Mike Sneesby, announced 200 jobs would be cut from the company in an effort to save $30m due to the “economic headwinds” facing the media.
The unionised mastheads are also facing industrial action by a workforce seething over the company’s latest pay offer of 2.5% during bargaining for a new enterprise bargaining agreement (EBA).
The Media Entertainment and Arts Alliance said journalists at the Sydney Morning Herald, the Age, the Australian Financial Review, Brisbane Times and WAtoday would begin taking action through social media and calling for public support this week.
“Members’ anger is white hot that the job cuts will fall disproportionately upon the publishing division, which is profitable and productive,” the acting director of MEAA media, Michelle Rae, said.
On Monday afternoon staff voted unanimously to take industrial action on Friday for five days and to call on management to suspend executive and senior leadership bonuses and invest the savings into the newsrooms.
The publishing division houses the newspapers once owned by Fairfax. Company wide – across Nine Television, Nine Radio, streaming service Stan and the digital division nine.com.au – the headcount is 5,000.
Chessell, 47, stood down from Nine in January after executive roles changed, and has been a partner at corporate consultancy Bespoke Approach.
Chessell also worked for the Australian as a business media journalist and was part of a Financial Review team that won the 2014 Walkley award for business journalism.
A former editor of the Australian, Stutchbury is the Financial Review’s longest-serving editor or editor-in-chief, and will return in a writing role as editor-at-large later in the year.
In 2014 he apologised to Western Australian readers of the national paper for a set of front-page headlines which read in part: “World is Fukt”.
The headline ran in error in the WA edition of the special Anzac Day weekend edition of the AFR. The edition is a four-day special on sale for the Anzac Day long weekend.
It has been a tumultuous few months at Australia’s biggest locally owned media company. Last month Peter Costello resigned as chair of Nine Entertainment “effective immediately” days after the former federal treasurer was accused of assaulting a News Corp journalist at Canberra airport.
Costello dismissed the allegations, saying “there was no assault” and that the journalist “fell over an advertising placard”.
The former news and current affairs director Darren Wick abruptly left the company in March after a formal complaint from a staff member. The company is undergoing an internal review into broader cultural issues.
