One in five journalists will be made redundant at The Independent and its Sunday sister title, the latest in a string of layoffs across the newspaper business brought on by the recession.

The deeper-than-expected cuts are designed to safeguard the future of the loss-making titles after tentative discussions to sell them to Zac Goldsmith broke down.

Simon Kelner, the managing director ofThe Independent, told staff that if no cuts were made it would be irresponsible in the extreme because “we’d be racking up losses that would threaten the very survival of these papers. So we’ve come up with a strategy we believe secures their future.”

Between 50 and 60 reporters and subeditors will go out of a total of about 250 and layoffs among sales and other staff take the total redundancies to 90, out of a workforce of 425, with compulsory job cuts not ruled out.

Newspaper advertising has collapsed in the recession, with local and national titles affected. This week the company behind the Daily Mail is expected to announce job cuts, while Trinity Mirror, Britain’s biggest local newspaper publisher, admitted this month that it had closed 28 titles this year. The cuts will save £10 million a year, which Mr Kelner, a former editor of The Independent, said would take the newspaper close to break even. No part of the two titles will be unaffected and the daily and Sunday titles will effectively be merged – with The Independent on Sunday kept open because “we generate a third of our revenues that day”.

Asked if he believed the titles’ journalism would be affected, Mr Kelner said that there was no simple answer because it was so difficult to measure that objectively. “I think we will have the staff to produce a successful newspaper,” he added.

Mr Kelner held talks over the summer with Mr Goldsmith, an heir to Sir James Goldsmith’s fortune, which could have seen Zac, his brother Ben and sister Jemima Khan take over the left-leaning title. “We had a couple of discussions but they realised they didn’t have the resources to sustain a national newspaper,” Mr Kelner said.

Mr Goldsmith, a Conservative parliamentary candidate in the marginal Richmond Park seat, is also a committed environmentalist. For many years he was the editor of The Ecologist, a title founded by his uncle Teddy and which remains in the family.

The Independent is owned by the Dublin-based Independent News & Media, which is controlled by Sir Anthony O’Reilly, the former rugby international and chief executive of the Heinz food group. Mr Kelner said that “the paper’s not for sale”, although the revelation of the talks with the Goldsmiths suggests that Sir Anthony may well be willing to sell for the right price.

Sir Anthony has also come under pressure from the second-largest shareholder in his company, the Irish telecoms magnate Denis O’Brien – who wants him to sell or close the newspapers, which rank fourth in the quality newspaper market.

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