Sweden's top-selling broadsheet newspaper Dagens Nyheter on Thursday announced a plan to slash one sixth of its workforce to rein in costs after racking up multi-million-euro losses.

"We were informed today that there is to be a job cutting plan concerning 100 to 120 people across the newspaper," said a union official, Hans Arbman.

Details of the job losses were expected in the coming few weeks, he said.

Founded in 1864, Dagens Nyheter is Sweden's top-selling broadsheet newspaper with some 890,000 daily readers out of a population of 9.3 million, and employs 580 people, half of them in the newsroom, according to the company website.

But last year the paper clocked up losses of around 10 million euros (13.7 million dollars), as the financial crisis threw a new challenge at a global newspaper industry still struggling to thrive in the age of the Internet.

The news came the same day as the Swedish publisher of free newspapers, Metro International, said it had its best ever quarter in the final three months of 2009.