About the same time Fairfax Media was moving towards the emails which told 120 metro journalists they were out of a job, I'd been looking at the story of one employee whose career path epitomises cultural change.

I had been chatting to Antony Payne - a former vice-president of Australia's Single Width Users Group - over breakfast at the group's annual conference a weekend ago.

Would it be the right time to profile an individual who had joined the company as a press electrician and now had a leading HR role helping lead cultural change across the increasingly digital-focussed publisher?

As events turned out - and after a reference to communications director Brad Hatch - it clearly wasn't.

I hope we'll manage an interview later. There's a story to tell, from electrician on the Newcastle Herald, through roles in production management there, and for Fairfax's northern NSW and Queensland region, and into occupational health and safety and now in to the vital cultural elements of human relations. And I suspect that it's about facing up to change and the opportunities it creates - the upside as well as the downside. And the priorities.

Right now, the priority at Fairfax - with journalists in Sydney, Melbourne and Canberra apparently walking off the job - is about getting the papers out, and of course, maintaining key news sites. It brought memories of my days running a family newspaper in the UK, when we were all urged to learn spend time with a neighbour, learning how to run the press and, for that matter, perform every critical job in the building.

Alan Kohler - a former editor of The Age and the Australian Financial Review for Fairfax - writes in News Corp rival The Australian today about the vexing question of how many journalists is the right number... and whether there is a viable business at all, "and whether (journalists) and their employers slip into a death spiral, in which the shrinking newsroom reduces sales and revenue, requiring further cost cutting, and so on."

It's not a new question: Former Fairfax chairman Roger Corbett famously remembered the days when its weekend papers landed with a 50mm thud... and foolishly through that publishing model would endure against growing competition from pure players.

Classified has long gone elsewhere, but the publishers who spent the proceeds of those "rivers of gold" on content are still living with the consequences of adjusting the size of newsrooms built on that revenue.

While pure players build their content spend via a very different model which, in some cases, involves raiding traditional media for content and talent.

My weekend at the SWUG conference - a technical and safety orientated event for the endangered species of print site managers - included a visit to Fairfax's North Richmond print site, based on what was once the glorious headquarters of Rural Press and its flagship, The Land. Apart from the production story which can read elsewhere on this site - it now prints the Sydney Morning Herald and AFR following the closure of the Chullora site - there is substantial office accommodation to which some previously city-based backoffice jobs were first moved, and then moved out, as savings from outsourcing pressed.

It's tritely expressed that change is today's constant (with death and taxes) and journalists at Fairfax know this, but no doubt feel an obligation to make a stand. Those who take their redundancy payments and go - or at least the more enterprising of them - may resurface online, running their own publishing business as Broadsheet's Nick Shelton (quoted by Alan Kohler) does, or working for such a digital publisher.

Fairfax doesn't owe them a living for life, and shares with publishers worldwide, the grim challenges of maintaining a business model in a world where most advertising revenue goes to Facebook and Google. What it needs, is more people who - like Antony Payne - recognise change and move with it.

Peter Coleman