Up to 200 staff to go as Seven’s owner swings the axe

Seven Network staff are bracing for mass job cuts, with up to 200 roles expected to be axed this week.

Some staff in the television newsroom have already been informed that their roles will be affected by Seven’s news leadership team this week. The cuts are expected to amount to as many as 200 redundancies across the entire company, with Southern Cross’ board meeting on Wednesday to rubber-stamp the decision. Most of the cuts will come from the Seven West Media side of the business, the sources said.

A short consultation period for voluntary redundancies at the company’s newspaper division closed on Monday, said a separate source with knowledge of the conversations, also not authorised to speak on the record.

Staff at West Australian Newspapers, which includes The West Australian and The Nightly, were asked for expressions of interest for a number of voluntary redundancies on Wednesday last week. But the consultation period for those cuts was only five days, and failed to attract enough applicants, meaning forced redundancies are likely to follow at the newspapers.

The cuts, which come just a month into new CEO Rohan Lund’s tenure, are designed to avert a profit warning from the company, one source said, after advertising market conditions continued to worsen this year for the commercial television sector. New figures from advertising insights agency SMI Guideline last week showed the television sector was down 25 per cent in April compared with 2025, compounding several years of a shrinking market.

Nine, the owner of this masthead, recently made redundancies in its television news division as part of its Future News strategy.

Lund has openly signalled a “resetting” of the company’s cost-base with staff, saying cuts are “the nature of the business” during an interview with industry website Mumbrella last week. With most of the cuts expected to come from the Seven side of the business, Lund also said Southern Cross’ radio business had already conducted significant cost-cutting.

“There’s a natural resetting of your cost base, and responding to cyclical conditions. And it’s hard, and it’s awful when that happens, but I can definitely see radio has gone through it more than anyone else in media, from what I can see at the moment,” Lund told Mumbrella.

However, senior company sources say the outcome under Lund has actually been scaled back from previous plans, which had indicated a far greater reduction in headcount. Seven’s newsroom made significant redundancies over the past 18 months, including letting a number of staff go in December.

Tension has