Plans to cut costs at The Scotsman and its sister titles will see 20 rather than 30 journalists leave the company, it has emerged.

Johnston Press announced a voluntary redundancy scheme last month in a bid to reduce the number of journalists at The Scotsman, Scotland on Sunday and Edinburgh Evening News by up to 30.

Journalists at the titles were told yesterday that this would be limited to 20 job losses but that pages would be cut across several sections including news and business as part of the cost-cutting.

There are also set to be changes to the portfolio of weekend magazines, with some supplements being merged together.

Following last month’s announcement, Paul Holleran, Scottish organiser at the National Union of Journalists, said staff at the titles had been left “incredulous” at the scale of the cuts proposed.

But he said today that he was happy with how talks with Johnston Press were progressing and he was hopeful that compulsory redundancies would be avoided.

He said the union was trying to reduce the number of job cuts still further and 12 people had so far applied for voluntary redundancy.

Paul said: “I think the company are doing their best to work with us and come up with a solution.

“We are never happy with redundancies but I think this is a real attempt to to try to protect the quality of the product.”

Under changes to the magazine titles, The Week, which is published with Scotland on Sunday, will be absorbed into its lifestyle magazine.

The Scotsman is also set to launch a Friends of The Scotsman project which would see up to two pages of “quality” content from organisations such as Edinburgh University published each day for a fee.

Last month Scotsman managing director Stuart Birkett said the company aimed to carry out the restructure through voluntary redundancies and redeployment.

The company has not yet responded to requests for a comment.