About 30 journalists employed by Independent News & Media have been informed that their jobs no longer exist as part of the company’s restructuring of its newsroom.

It is understood that feature writers and columnists, and some photographers, are among those that have been told by INM management that their current roles will not be continuing.

Representatives of the National Union of Journalists have met management of the company. “We have asked for clarification of their proposals in writing,” said the NUJ’s Irish secretary Séamus Dooley.

“We would be gravely concerned at the prospect of compulsory redundancies.”

Robert Pitt, INM's chief executive since October, met staff of its national newspaper titles last Thursday at a "town hall" event in Dublin's Odeon cinema to signal his plans to reorganise its editorial operations.

Detailed briefings have been given this week to employees whose jobs are “at risk”.

The company is planning to merge some of the operations of the Irish Independent, the Sunday Independent, the Herald, the Sunday World and Independent.ie.

About one in eight editorial jobs will be lost from INM’s Talbot Street headquarters as a result.

Last year, some 20 employees left the Herald and the Sunday World under voluntary redundancy schemes last year, while 50 jobs were lost from Real-time Editing & Design (RE&D), a company to which it had outsourced sub-editing tasks.

The company also hired 29 people last year to work on in-house production and online reporting as it bid to intensify its focus on digital media.