Up to 200 jobs are set to go at Seven this week, with Southern Cross Media preparing to push through a round of redundancies that will hit the wider company and fall hardest on the Seven West Media side of the business. Some television newsroom staff have already been told their roles are under threat.

The board is due to meet on Wednesday to rubber-stamp the decision, putting a date on a process that has been building since the merger between Southern Cross Media and Seven West Media earlier this year. For staff, the Seven Network job cuts now look less like speculation than a matter of days.

The scale matters because the reductions could reach as many as 200 redundancies across the company at a time when commercial television advertising remains under pressure. Advertising insights agency SMI Guideline said the television sector was down 25 per cent in April compared with 2025, a slide that has fed through to programming, newsrooms and support roles alike.

Rohan Lund, who has been in the chief executive job for about a month, has already signalled how he sees the business. In an interview last week, he said cuts were “the nature of the business” and argued that Southern Cross’ radio arm had already absorbed significant cost-cutting. He also said there is a “natural resetting” of the cost base when companies respond to cyclical conditions, while acknowledging how hard that process is.

But the outcome under Lund appears to have been scaled back from earlier plans that had pointed to a far larger reduction in headcount. That does not make the coming round small. It does suggest the company has pulled back from the deepest version of the cuts once being discussed.

The pressure is not confined to television. A five-day consultation period for voluntary redundancies at the company’s newspaper division closed on Monday after staff at West Australian Newspapers were asked for expressions of interest last Wednesday, and the process failed to draw enough applicants. Forced redundancies are now likely to follow there as well.

Seven’s newsroom has already been through repeated trimming over the past 18 months, including another round in December, and a number of senior executives left after Jeff Howard’s exit in February. The latest move lands in a business still adjusting to the merger and to the fact that Southern Cross Media now spans Seven, Triple M, the Hit Network and LiSTNR.

What happens next is straightforward and brutal: the board is expected to sign off on Wednesday, staff are due to be told in the days after, and the company will finally show how the cuts are split across its television, newspaper and wider media operations.