Telegraph owner poised to make newsroom job cuts in investment promise U-turn

The new owner of the Telegraph is preparing to make significant job cuts to its newsroom, just months after stating it would invest in the title to make it the “leading centre-right media outlet in the English-speaking world”.

Axel Springer, the German media company overseen by its billionaire chief executive, Mathias Döpfner, is understood to be examining proposals that would make between 50 and 100 journalists redundant.

A source familiar with the plans said a forthcoming consultation was likely to propose cutting a “significant proportion” of editorial staff, possibly before Christmas.

They said such proposals called into question Axel Springer’s promise to “back an investment programme in [the Telegraph Media Group] to grow and expand the business”.

A spokesperson for the Telegraph Media Group declined to comment. No redundancies have been announced to staff so far.

It would mark the first big intervention by Axel Springer since its £575m purchase of the Telegraph earlier this year. The sale ended three tortuous years for the Telegraph and its staff, during which potential owners were blocked, fell through or faced fierce internal opposition.

The proposed cuts have confused some Telegraph figures, who are struggling to understand how it aligns with Döpfner’s pledge to “bring that uncertainty to an end”.

At a recent Axel Springer leadership summit held in London, Döpfner is also said to have stated that the company could not cut its way to growth.

Axel Springer, which also owns Politico and the German titles Bild and Die Welt, recently brought in consultants to examine the financial health of the Telegraph titles, which include the Daily Telegraph, the Sunday Telegraph and its online news operation.

Döpfner has made no secret of his desire to boost the Telegraph’s US operation, with senior editors already deployed to the US to develop those plans.

However, consultants are understood to have drawn up potential cuts to the existing news operation at the 171-year-old titles.

Sources said consultants had also recommended that the Telegraph set up side projects to support its journalism, such as price comparison sites and healthcare. Some insiders were said to be baffled by some of the suggestions.

A source familiar with the proposals said they would anger Telegraph staff, who had hoped Axel Springer’s ownership would mark the arrival of “sunny uplands” after three years of being “starved of any form of investment, pay rises or management changes that could move us on”.

“The path to growth is not to cut jobs,” they said. “They’re still going to need to hire people in the States if they’re going to make any sort of push there, but staff haven’t been told where that money is going to come from.”

The Telegraph Media Group’s latest accounts showed that it had slumped to a £4m loss last year as a result of legal fees connected to its ownership saga and the revaluing of assets. Its revenue had also fallen slightly from 2024 to £273.2m.

However, the accounts of Telegraph Media Group Holdings also revealed it had made an underlying pre-tax operating profit of about £48m.