Nine editorial staff, including newspaper journalists at its flagship publications The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, have been told to increase their use of AI in an all-staff meeting this week. Managing director of publishing Tory Maguire told staff on Wednesday that the company’s board expected everyone at Nine to be using AI, and that management would be monitoring staff usage of AI to that effect. Maguire told staff that the publishing division of Nine, which encompasses Melbourne’s Age and Sydney’s Herald, as well as the business-oriented Australian Financial Review, was underperforming in its utilisation of AI and that the relevant staff needed to increase their AI usage. When asked about the security of staff jobs in relation to the directive to increase AI usage, Maguire told staff that Nine could not guarantee what work would look like in three years, let alone six months. It is understood that, during the meeting, staff members working in AI presented on the benefits of the technology for news staff, speaking glowingly of the Italian conservative liberal newspaper Il Foglio, which in 2025 claimed it was the first publication in the world to produce an edition entirely through AI. MEAA media section director Cassie Derrick told Crikey that job security was a paramount concern. “MEAA members at Nine newspapers are rightly concerned about the rollout of AI in their newsrooms, including the impact on job security,” she said. “While AI will play an increasing role in workplaces, including newsrooms, it cannot and should not displace human journalists who are central to the production of quality journalism that readers rely upon.” Nine declined to comment when contacted by Crikey.
The use of AI at Nine has grown in recent years, as it has across the industry to varying degrees, including the use of an AI tool called 9ExPress (which uses Google’s Vertex AI platform) to convert television scripts into digital stories for nine.com.au. Nine CEO Matt Stanton said in February at the release of the company’s half-year financial results that the publishing division would be licensing content for AI large language models as a means of revenue generation, and also said that AI tools were being deployed internally at Nine, with Google’s Gemini being used for “general productivity”. Nine first published its AI editorial guidelines in January 2025 and last updated them in November 2025. They are underpinned by the general principle that “there must always be a human between any AI tool and our audience”. Some of the hard lines for the Nine papers’ editorial policy include the outright use of AI in writing stories for publication and the generation of images. Two key points of the editorial policy are that AI will not be used to “write stories for publication” or to “generate photo-realistic images or illustrations for publication, except in cases where the AI-generated nature of the image is the point of the story”. In July 2024, following a strike action centred on the Paris Olympics (on which Nine spent $305 million for the broadcast rights), staff at Nine struck a pay deal that included commitments to the ethical use of AI. On April 9, the day after the all-staff meeting, the Nine papers published an article by columnist Tim Duggan titled “Three things to do when AI comes for your job”, hooked off recent mass layoffs at Oracle.
Nine’s editorial staff, which includes The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age and the Australian Financial Review, were told at an all-staff meeting that their use of AI must improve, and that management would be monitoring staff usage of AI to that effect.
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