Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp has posted an $817m financial year loss on the back of dramatic falls in the value of newspapers in the UK and Australia and write downs at Australian pay TV platform Foxtel.

Revenue was $8.14bn, down 2% from $8.29bn last year, due to lower print advertising revenue and foreign currency fluctuations, the New York-based company said.

The Australian arm of the Murdoch empire should brace itself for another round of cost cutting as the $40m cut from the business in 2017 would be repeated in 2018, the company signalled.

The disappointing results come after a bruising period of layoffs at the Australian mastheads, including 70 staff photographers in May and the majority of production and sub-editing staff in recent months.

However, digital subscriptions at the Australian mastheads are growing steadily from 225,600 in 2014-15 to 271,000 in 2015-16 to 363,000 this financial year.

Elsewhere, the Times and the Sunday Times now have a digital-only subscription base of 201,000 and the Wall Street Journal has moved past one million paid subscribers to 1,270,000.

Digital advertising revenue is also up and now accounts for 25% – up from 22% last year – of all revenue from the news and information division of the global media and entertainment company.

But overall subscription and circulation revenue in the news and information division is down due to foreign currency fluctuations.

Although the company is increasingly reliant on its real estate property arm for growth, the REA Group’s net profit was down almost 20% from last year to $206m.

The global company wrote down the value of its 50% stake in pay TV company Foxtel by $290m as well as cut the value of The Australian, The Daily Telegraph and The Herald Sun by 40%.

News Corp chief executive Robert Thomson told investors the financial year was marked by a fast growing digital real estate services segment, growing digital subscriptions for the premium newspapers and cost cutting.

“I think it’s fair to say on the digital advertising front that in the last half of the fiscal year, we didn’t see the growth that we wanted,” Thomson said.

“We’re confident there will be an improvement in advertising, coordinated with the improvement in digital audience.

“News Corp led the global debate about content value and values, prompting the digital platforms to address a dysfunctional content eco-system, in which the fake and the fraudulent have flourished. We are now in advanced discussions with those platforms over the creation of payment mechanisms for news of verified veracity.”

Thomson, the chairman of News Corp, Rupert Murdoch and son Lachlan are this week holding an annual meeting with the company’s editors, including News Corp Australia CEO Michael Miller, in Los Angeles.