A loss to the nation’s media junkies today, with Age columnist and former Media Watch host Jonathan Holmes taking to Twitter to say today’s column in the Age will be his last.

He says he tried to say this to his readers in print, but the line was cut from his copy. In a series of tweets he wrote:

“The Age dumped its excellent comment editor Sushi Das 2 weeks ago. In 3 years she never cut a line from one of my columns. This week I was asked for 900 words and supplied them. But this is the last par that they dumped: ‘I said a year ago in this space that Australia is on the way to creating a secret police. This I’m told is to be my last column for Fairfax Media. But here, or elsewhere, I’ll try to keep tabs on our ever-diminishing freedoms. We all should’.

“Thanks to all who have said nice things. Apparently I may be invited to contribute to The Age from time to time. We’ll see”.

Later, Holmes noted that the par was cut online but not in the print edition. “Maybe just a mistake,” he wrote.

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Holmes is one of a number of freelance contributors who’ve been told their columns have been axed due to cost-cutting at Fairfax. Dozens of staff have also taken redundancies, as the company seeks to save millions from the operating costs of its papers.