Fairfax Media's chief executive Greg Hywood says the company has successfully negotiated a difficult few years but stopped short of guaranteeing the future of its printed newspapers.
Mr Hywood said Fairfax's major mastheads - including The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald (SMH) and The Australian Financial Review - were more profitable now than at any time in the last three years.
He also revealed that the ruthless cost-cutting of recent years had extended to him no longer having his own office to create space.
There has been speculation the company will stop printing its newspapers from Monday to Friday because of falling circulation and revenue.
The SMH and Age were currently the two best-read mastheads in the country, he said.
The newspapers were making more money because the cover price had been lifted by 50 per cent and it had dropped newspaper production by 30 per cent because it was unprofitable, deliberately reducing circulation, he said.
"We're going to sustain our mastheads well into the future," he told a Melbourne Press Club luncheon but would not guarantee the printed editions would be around in five years.
However he said newspaper circulation in absolute terms had been declining in Australia since 1978 before the internet and now smartphones accelerated it.
"For The SMH and The Age, 65 per cent of its audience is through digital means," Mr Hywood said.
"If that is where the audience is that is what we're going to deliver to them."
The problem for newspaper publishers has been that increasing volumes of online readers have not more revenue because they have lost print property, jobs and car classified sales to new independent websites.
Key Fairfax investor Simon Marais said this week that Fairfax might be at the end of its life cycle in its current form and may be broken up because of those structural changes.
However Mr Hywood said the company was creating a bright future and new model in which digital subscriptions, marketing services and property services including its Domain business and future businesses were replacing lost revenue.
Education, travel, health and lifestyle were areas it might invest in, he said.
"Who said the only way to sustain journalism was through classified advertising?" he said.
"If those were the rules, they've certainly gone now ... the future is uncertain, its a dynamic organism, it's life ... we like what we see."
Fairfax has been hit by significant jobs cuts including the loss of many journalists but took its responsibility to provide quality journalism and investigative journalism to the community seriously, he said.
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