Victoria Police have executed search warrants at The Age newspaper in Melbourne.

Officers from the e-crime squad are investigating an allegation that the personal details of some Victorians were electronically accessed by "a media outlet" via a confidential political party database without authorisation.

Police are refusing to make any further comment.

Last year The Age revealed the Labor Party had the personal details of thousands of Victorians in its database that was being accessed by campaign workers before the state election.

The head legal counsel for Fairfax, Gail Hambly, says the company is not surprised by the development.

"It's the first time we've had any formal contact," she said.

"But the issue has been raised before and both the Age and Fairfax, at a general level, are very comfortable that we've done the right thing right through the gathering of the information around these stories."

Ms Hambly says police are speaking to Age editor Paul Ramadge and some of the paper's senior journalists and lawyers.

"I understand that they have warrants to investigate the stories that we ran earlier in the year regarding the ALP database and privacy issues around that," she said.

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'Incredibly intrusive'

But she says The Age will do everything it can to protect the confidentiality of its sources if necessary.

Ms Hambly says she is unsure why the police are investigating, but has defended reporting the issue because it is in the public interest.

"There's no dispute that the Labor Party had databases with private information, quite a lot of private information relating to citizens," she said.

"And that, the fact that they held that material and the way that it had been obtained, was a relevant issue."

She says journalists found the raid on the newspaper's office "incredibly intrusive".

"But then I expect that any citizen finds police coming into their building as incredibly serious and somewhat disturbing," she said.

"I think it's too early to say just how confronting or how serious the raids are because we really don't know what the next steps are.

"In the past these issues in other places, other newspapers, have generally been sorted out between the police and the publisher to come to an accommodation that people can accept."