Australian Community Media (ACM) has told staff it will cut dozens of journalist roles at some of its largest newspapers.

The media company informed staff in a town hall meeting on Wednesday of its decision to make 35 editorial positions redundant across its business.

Voluntary redundancies would be offered to staff first while journalists from the video, agriculture, property and federal politics teams would be protected from job losses. 

Staff were told 18 journalist positions would be lost across ACM’s largest mastheads the Canberra Times, Illawarra Mercury and Newcastle Herald.

The ABC understands there will be six redundancies at each of the papers, while the Mercury will only lose two current staff as it has yet to fill four vacant journalist positions.

In an email to employees, ACM managing director Tony Kendall said the job losses were a consequence of Facebook’s parent company Meta withdrawing funding.

“As this funding loss has approached we have taken prudent, but difficult, steps to reshape our portfolio,” he said.

ACM journalists have told the ABC the announcement was a kick in the guts for already under-resourced regional newsrooms. 

Media Entertainment Arts Alliance acting director Michelle Rae said the cuts were a devastating blow to regional journalism.

“These job cuts are coming from newsrooms that already do not have the resources to tell the vibrant and vital stories of their regional communities,” she said.

“The communities these papers serve are the real losers in this situation.”

Regional newspapers cut 

ACM recently announced eight regional newspaper mastheads would discontinue print editions in the coming weeks.

The final copies of the Inverell Times, Moree Champion, Tenterfield Star, Glen Innes Examiner, Country Leader, Dungog Chronicle, Gloucester Advocate and Milton-Ulladulla Times will be published on September 16.

It said nine roles across sales and editorial could be made redundant if staff could not be redeployed.

Mr Kendall said while the papers’ websites would remain running, local journalists would be redeployed to larger mastheads and continue to cover the regions from a distance.

“Sadly, local reporting won’t exist in those areas,” he said.

“When a big story breaks in one of those particular towns, we’ll obviously cover it from one of the nearest papers we’ve got, but there will be no local people on the ground.

“If [the journalist] can’t be redeployed their role will be made redundant.”

Mr Kendall said a fall in government advertising and the ending of an agreement with Meta, the parent company of Facebook, had contributed to the decision.

“The details of those commercial arrangements [Meta] are confidential, but certainly the government advertising spending has fallen by 70 per cent since the government came into office,” he said.

Mr Kendall said the decision was a difficult one to make because of the impact on staff and the communities.

“The reliance people need on quality, independently sourced local news, that hasn’t changed,” he said.

“We’ve seen in Canada, the government introduced a 30 per cent tax rebate for journalists after Meta pulled the funding over there, those sorts of positions would actively encourage people to hire and recruit more journalists.”

“Or simply by taxing Meta and having some of that come back to sustain regional journalism.”