Industry Super-backed news publication The New Daily is shedding staff as its owner gets ready to offload the publication, with a deal expected to be finalised by year’s end.

The New Daily’s owner, Industry Super Holdings – the superannuation sector’s collectively held investment arm – put the publication on the market earlier this year, saying the loss-making publication was finding it harder to keep itself afloat.

Solstice Media, which publishes The New Daily at present through its subsidiary Motion Publishing, is in pole position to buy the publication, which has been steadily cutting staff.

Eight positions have been made redundant, while a handful of staff will be offered new roles, Motion managing director Paul Hamra said. Several others have left the organisation recently.

“We want to keep The New Daily going, as we have set it up 10 years ago,” Hamra said. “We’ve got a really large audience, and we want to continue to serve that large audience … We need to rely on integrating it into the Solstice company so that we can offset some of the costs within our existing operations. We have a significant audience that’s still very attractive to advertisers.”

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The brainchild of then-Industry Super chair Garry Weaven, The New Daily was set up in 2013 by six industry superannuation funds and run by former Age and Herald Sun editor Bruce Guthrie. It has about 500,000 subscribers, with many of those members of industry funds, including Australian Super and Cbus.

Over time, the fund established a five-year plan to make The New Daily self-sufficient, with advertising revenue and money from tech giants Google and Meta becoming its main sources of income.

However, after weak display advertising market conditions, which have ravaged the industry, and the end of a commercial deal that Solstice Media had with Meta, Industry Super Holdings had considered it would be unable to break even.