SENIOR journalists will be offered redundancy at The Sydney Morning Herald and The Sun-Herald as part of an $8 million program that unions said would gut the Fairfax newspapers.

SENIOR journalists will be offered redundancy at The Sydney Morning Herald and The Sun-Herald as part of an $8 million program that unions said would gut the Fairfax newspapers.

John Fairfax Holdings issued a statement to the Australian Stock Exchange yesterday afternoon saying the redundancies would be voluntary in the first instance and it was hoped that between 35 and 45 editorial employees would take up the offer.

The editors of both papers, Robert Whitehead and Phil McLean, issued a joint statement to staff saying that the average pay for their journalists was more than $100,000 a year and that they had a disproportionately high number of staff on senior pay levels.

“This staff mix has severely limited our ability to award pay increases and to hire new staff,” the statement said. “Low turnover … has created a bottleneck for those seeking more opportunities. It has constrained our ability to support the promotion of junior editorial staff.”

Federal secretary of the Media Arts and Entertainment Alliance Chris Warren said the announcement had come “out of the blue”.

“One in 10 staff will go, one in five of their senior staff will go,” he said. “I don’t think any paper can just cut that sort of experience and produce the same paper.”