Job cull looms at The Guardian

The company, which is owned by Guardian Media Group and backed by charitable foundation The Scott Trust, plans to make £25m of savings over the next five years and to prioritise digital over print.

Its unaudited accounts for the year to 31 March 2011 reveal £33m of cash outflow - GNM's preferred accounting measure – just slightly less than the £34.4m operating loss it recorded the previous year.

GNM cut 203 jobs during the period and nearly 100 more the year before, but has struggled to narrow losses because of sliding revenues. GNM's unaudited EBITDA for 2010/11 was £22m.

GMG declined to put a figure on the number of jobs set to go in the next wave of redundancies but it is thought it could be as high as 175.

Chief executive Andrew Miller told staff in a series of briefings yesterday that the group could run out of cash in three to five years unless it underwent a "major transformation" and targeted GNM to double its annual revenues from digital from £47m to £91m by 2016.

The newspaper will also undergo its biggest redesign since it moved to the Berliner format, possibly before the end of the year.

Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger said it was responding to "inexorable trends" in the way people consume media. "That doesn't mean getting out of print, but it does require a greater focus of attention, imagination and resource on the various forms that digital future is likely to take," he said.

"We will be changing the printed Monday to Friday newspaper to take account of changing patterns of readership and advertising. Half our readers now read the paper in the evening: they get our breaking news from our website or on mobile."

The Guardian will continue to publish in the morning, but will focus on analysis and opinion instead of reporting widely available news.

There are no immediate plans to change the Saturday Guardian or the Observer but a source said GNM will look at those publications in due course.

GNM is also looking to America to help prop up sliding revenues with the launch of a digital-only operation in New York later this year.