Jobs to go in Nine / Fairfax merger

144 roles will be made redundant by the merger of Nine and Fairfax with 92 people impacted.

CEO Hugh Marks today confirmed the new structure to commence from Monday December 10:

• Australian Community Media, Printing and Stuff – which continues to be led by Allen Williams, Managing Director Community and Printing. The New Zealand business, Stuff, will report through to Allen but continues to be run by CEO Sinead Boucher.
• Publishing: including, Metro Mastheads, Nine Digital and Events – will be led by Chris Janz as Managing Director, Publishing.
• Stan – led by CEO Mike Sneesby; and
• Television – led by Michael Healy as Director of Television.

Greg Barnes will be Chief Financial Officer. Michael Stephenson will continue in his role as Chief Sales Officer with Lizzie Young continuing as Group Director of Content Strategy, which includes Powered.

Other Corporate appointments include Alexi Baker as Director of Strategy and Corporate Development; Rachel Launders as General Counsel and Company Secretary and Vanessa Morley as Director of People and Culture.

Current Fairfax CEO Greg Hywood is retiring.

Nine also becomes majority shareholder in Domain led by Jason Pellegrino, and Macquarie Radio led by Adam Lang. Both businesses will remain as separately listed companies with independent boards.

Other redundancies in departments such as IT, ERP, HR, payroll, office productivity and content management are yet to be decided. Nine plans to redeploy affected employees where possible. Discussions with impacted staff are expected to take place in the next few weeks.

“Thank you to everyone for your patience as we have worked through the process. We can now move forward with confidence as a stronger and more sustainable business with many new and exciting opportunities ahead. This is truly an amazing opportunity for our combined future,” Marks said.

The company will number around 6000 employees following completion of the merger.