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.

The new chief executive of Southern Cross Media, Rohan Lund, has been open about looming cuts just a month after taking on the job but is expected to formalise those comments by informing staff in coming days, said three sources with knowledge of the matter who are not authorised to speak publicly.

Some staff members of 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 tomorrow 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 also 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.

Seven did not respond to several requests for comment. Southern Cross Media also owns radio networks Triple M and the Hit Network as well as digital audio platform LiSTNR.

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 that 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 that Southern Cross’ radio business has 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 been building between the Southern Cross Media and Seven West Media sides of the business since the merger earlier this year, with three different chairs and chief executives in the time since. A number of senior Seven executives left after CEO Jeff Howard’s exit in February, with the majority of the company’s executive leadership team still comprising former Southern Cross Media executives. But after Lund was appointed as an external choice for the CEO role, power shifted back towards the company’s largest shareholder, Kerry Stokes, and the former Seven side of the business.

Heith Mackay-Cruise, Southern Cross’ chair and the chair of the company before the merger, will step down from the board at the end of June. He is to be replaced by Teresa Dyson, a former Seven West Media director.

Last month, after former Seven commercial director and Stokes-ally Bruce McWilliam emerged as the company’s second-largest shareholder, Australia’s richest person, Gina Rinehart, was revealed as the money behind his stake.

Media companies regularly make redundancies towards the end of the financial year, though the scale of the touted cuts signals the financial challenge Lund and his team must overcome. The two businesses merged in January, creating a $420 million media business with assets in television, newspapers and audio. But since January, the company’s market capitalisation has fallen to $287 million.

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