A senior Fairfax journalist has hit out at the company's "brutal" staff redundancy plans, saying further bureau mergers and cuts were being considered.
Fairfax announced on Tuesday it would cut five percent of its full-time workers - 550 staff - across Australia and New Zealand, prompting a mass walk-out at its offices including in Melbourne and Sydney.
Almost one third of the positions to go are journalists.
Sydney Morning Herald (SMH) senior writer Gerard Noonan said it was the wrong move by management when newspapers needed to refocus on quality, to combat the internet-sourced media.
"We have got a problem now with the company. It is being run by people who don't have ink in their veins," Mr Noonan told ABC Radio today.
"And this latest act is basically bowing to the market, and saying we've got a market downturn here and what do we do, we reach for the knife.
"This is really a pretty brutal way of doing it." Mr Noonan said Fairfax's Canberra-based reporters had successfully argued for more than 10 years for the retention of individual SMH and The Age political bureaus.
"In discussion that we've had in the last couple of days they've said not only the Canberra bureaus of the two great newspapers ... are on the table, but also so too are foreign bureaus (at risk of closure)," he said.
"You can slim it down to one bureau in Canberra covering everything, but you end up diminishing the analysis of the democratic process, and very seriously so."
