The "Irish Times" and the case of missing domestic investigative journalism
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The IT has some good journalists and some bad ones too but not as bad as the Indo which wears its bias on its sleeve. The IT does not challenge authority enough but when it does it does a great job. Karlin Lillington and Fintan O'Toole are good at that. It is also worth noting that the IT were involved in breaking the Panama Papers. Some of the international syndications are not great but you will find that in all walks of life.
I think the IT will have to get used to an Ireland where SF is in power and they won't be alone but the Indo will find it harder as they are dyed in the wool blueshirts
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Wow, lots of people agreeing that MSM journalism "is going down the toilet". So how did we get here; perhaps:
- The media, with increasing regularity, arrogantly presenting to the Irish public a world view that we simply do not recognise.
- That same media then "patiently" re-educating us - aka aggressively reprimanding us for daring to disagree with the "facts" they've presented.
- The Govmt then ensuring that we know that this is our fault - and will definitely be our problem.
Begging your forgiveness sir, did I mis-learn any of your lessons? ;-)
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I do wonder about Irish times and it's editors,as many of its headlines/articles and pieces are at a contraction to its evidence it purports to support em
Leaving ones personal view/politics aside of it,Micheal D,refusal to partake in centenary commerations for the north was editorialised to be presented as controversial/dividing public,while Irish times polls on subject showed something like 90% approval for his stance
It sometimes comes across as an extravagant blog which if it's intentions is to challenge readers view,fair enough,but to simply misrepresent evidence in place of furthering an argument is simply dishonest and places it along side daily mail etc,except without the glamourous pics
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"Be woke, go broke".
I love it! But it suits the IT down to the ground;they can champion all the "right" causes (FG on bikes and the like) and ignore the real issues facing the average person in society - who, let's face it, won't read the IT anyway.
For years, I used to buy it religiously every day - and then Madam Editor thought it would be amusing to buy syndicated neoliberal and neocon material from the US. I thought to myself "Well I for one an not going to pay for that crap." And in the last 15 years or so, I have bought the IT maybe once a year, perhaps twice in
a really good year -an election year for instance.4 -
It is a business problem. Many Woke people grew up when content was free on the Web so they are less likely to want to pay for it. There's also the problem of cafes with free newspapers. That means that they have more than one reader who will not buy a copy. Convincing people to pay for content that was previously free is difficut. The IT ran into that with its first paywall effort. It took all the content that people use to read and discuss on the Web and paywalled it. What was happening around the same time was the launch of Google Adsense advertising around 2003. These ads allowed publishers to monetise content and still leave most of it online for free. It completely changed the business model of online publishing. Eventually, the IT gave up on its first paywall and the figures were dreadful. I think that it got approximately 38K subscriptions for the period in which the paywall was active. I don't think that there was a breakdown on the subscriptions by length or type.
A few years ago in the US, some publications such as the Huffington Post and Buzzfeed fired complete departments which had concentrated on Woke topics. This led to the "Learn to code" meme being used to troll these newly unemployed journalists. The basis for the meme was coalminers and others being told to retrain and learn to code. There was also that infamous Gillette razor ad that caused massive problems for its owners and an $8 billlion writedown for Gillette.
The IT does have a few Woke types but they are very much in a minority. Its business still is ordinary journalism and commentary. There are really two ITs. The main one is the weekday IT which is aimed at the typical IT audience. The second is the Weekend/Saturday edition which is really a Sunday newspaper published on a Saturday. much of the Lifestyle stuff is included in the supplement. The two Weekday/Weekend editions thing isn't original. The Financial Times has been doing this weekday/weekend edition thing for decades. The problem for the IT is that the line between Lifestyle stuff and journalism became increasingly blurred. That led to bad decisions like the focus on property porn while the signals were evident that it was a highly abnormal market. Madam, from what I remember, was also an ex-PD TD but she also stood up for the right of journalists to protect their sources.
Regards...jmcc
Post edited by jmcc on7 -
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I find it amusing that a newspaper that until relatively recently, was blatantly sectarian, advertising jobs for “conscientious Protestant men” etc. Who employed no Catholics until relatively recently. Has become Uber woke in tone. While retaining an almost exclusively white, middle class board, management and work force. Fintan O’ Toole et al.
Do as we say not as we do.
Multo autem ad rem magis pertinet quallis tibi vide aris quam allis
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The IT broke the Bishop Casey scandal but the editor Conor Brady basically said he didn't want to publish it. I know libel laws in Ireland are strict, but why, this was a massive scoop at the time. I think fear of rivals getting it reluctantly changed his mind plus they were able to "follow the money" to Annie Murphy.
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How relatively recently was that?
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Had a quick read through here and whats left out is the influence PR companies have on media in general.
The “fees” they pay to media outlets on behalf of their clients has become a vital income stream for many media and has led to a situation where in many cases they can have distinct influence over what gets published and have some sway over what doesn't.
The government pay massive money to PR companies, probably the largest in the country by far who in turn pay to have certain stories reported, and you dont bite the hand that feeds you.
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I used to buy a newspaper maybe 4-5 days a week. That stopped about a decade ago so I guess I'm part of the problem.
The decline in quality journalism is woefully apparent.
The prevalence of LGBT reports and opinion pieces etc wears me down. Instead of helping the cause, it turns me off it. It's beyond saturation point. I hate the term but "woke" pieces are tedious and an irritant. I'm so tired of hearing about these things. Tired of columnists ramming home some pious views or crusade on issues that either don't exist for most in the real world or do exist but on such a minuscule scale it doesn't warrant the airtime it gets.
Another depressing form of journalism is the pasting of a series of random tweets on a topic together and calling it news or a representative view of people when it's really not. The Journal is abysmal for this type of journalism. 20-something writers with no experience of a time when journalism was real quality who've copied and pasted pieces together and inserted a tweet or two and called it an article.
I've often asked where I can find informed well written articles with an Irish viewpoint and never get a good answer.
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In reality the reason you stopped was because all of the content is more accessible online than trying to read a newspaper.
I can't say I noticed an overly LGBT change in journalism but it was from nothing to something so it was an increase but nothing to suggest it was ruining other content
Like I would have bought papers in years gone by for sport specifically. Now? I have podcast which I use to find a lot more in-depth information than a journalist can put in an article. These podcast are free but the best content is paid so I end up paying for the podcast.
I was listening to a podcast recently and one of the stripe lads was on, they have bought into an audio books company. They say it is the future and in a few years nobody will read a book.
So the days of buying a newspaper in the shop will be gone very very soon.
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In reality the reason you stopped was because all of the content is more accessible online than trying to read a newspaperI don't disagree with this. You're right.
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Pre-Twitter, it was necessary for journalists to contact people and get the quotes directly. It involved meeting people, making phonecalls or e-mailing them. With Twitter or Facebook, the quotes are available for everyone to see and don't require much work apart from verification. There was no pre-Twitter golden age of Journalism because a lot of what may have appeared to have been direct quotes were actually lifted from press releases.
A lot of what passes for journalism consists of recycled press releases. It is free content and easily adapted. Some press releases have quotes from key people and they tend to turn up verbatim as "told 'publication name'" when in reality it was just lifted from the press release. Other stuff from a press release is either used to pad out the article or slightly changed. It doesn't require much work. It is also extremely vulnerable to automation.
The problem with with well informed and well written articles is that there is a requirement for the journalist to be well informed and to understand the subject. That requires specialisation. Many journalists don't have the time to specialise until they've been in the job for some time. The problem for younger journalists is that news organisations are already beginning to use Artificial Intelligence programs to summarise press releases and other reports. Some of these programs or the services using them are cheaper than employing full-time journalists.
The reader comments on the IT articles used to be an interesting metric for the popularity of articles. The Web changed a lot of things for newspapers like the IT and it was possible for the publishers to see which articles were popular and which were not. This was completely different to the old print model where someone had to buy the entire newspaper to read one article. It has also caused serious problems for many newspapers because the digital subscription model is quite different to the print model. The majority of sales in the print model are one-off sales. The reader buys a copy of the newspaper. With Digital, the reader has to subscribe for a period (ideally a year). That's a big psychological change for most readers. Though some Irish newspapers claim that their Digital strategies are working, the information on the duration of these subscriptions is quite sparse. The problem for the IT is that its digital and print readership are different.
Regards...jmcc
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The shoehorning of "wokeness" as a reason newspaper sales have fallen off a cliff is laughable. Sales of The Guardian and The Sun from 2003 to present day have both gone in the exact same downward trajectory. That'll be The Sun owned by Mr. Progressive Wokeness Rupert Murdoch.
The impact of the internet on newspapers has been twofold, firstly it has decimated physical copy sales. Secondly, and back to the original point, it changed the priority of publishers to chase immediate clicks. The Daily Mail, a relative online success in this era, have banks of people who scour the internet for garbage stories they can rewrite into copy for their online rag, with divisiveness as a priority and a sprinkling of tits. The rise of inane cultural commentators churning out hot takes, again the more divisive the better, has been at the detriment of longform articles which were built upon months and sometimes years of investigation.
The online trend was exacerbated by Facebook. People forget that advertising agencies lost their minds over this traffic. Go back and watch Super Bowl adverts from several years ago and instead of, for e.g., Coca-Cola using their .Com they promoted FB/Coca-Cola. This driving of traffic to Facebook was across the board. Newspapers chased this type of audience building too, then Facebook turned around and F***ed everyone by charging for access to the audiences that these brands built into a silo they didn't own. This should be a lesson to any business owner using third party platforms to promote, YouTube, Twitter etc.
A lot of the longer investigations by people at NYT, FT etc. end up becoming books and then films/TV series. If you enjoy longer articles I recommend https://longreads.com/.
Someone mentioned the IT tried a digital subscription model in 2003, sometimes the right idea is just too early. Here is some further reading from 2011 on the NYT and their execution of digital - https://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/21/business/media/21times.html and here is an article from them written in 2022 where they've just purchased The Athletic, an interesting business launch in its own right in the context being discussed here, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/02/business/media/nyt-earnings-q4-2021.html.
Now Journalists have the option of going out on their own on platforms like Substack. In the future I expect there will be more investigations by people into organizations that are funded this way. So a mass of people annoyed by 'Bank X' will fund a Matt Taibbi type figure who is looking into that company for months/years.
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The PR companies recruit journalists and as such they would have good contact lists. PR companies tend to be good at what they do or they wouldn't last very long. They generally don't have to pay media outlets to run stories.
Regards...jmcc
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What media outlets are accepting fees from PR companies for publishing articles?
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The IT is really just a provincial newspaper when compared to the New York Times. The NYT had a print circulation of about 1.1 million copies a day at the time that the IT launched its first paywall. The IT was approaching 100K a day. The NYT has a much larger market and its digital strategy has been a success. It has around 9.1 million subscribers. The ABC figures from 2019 for the IT showed that it had 24,389 digital subs in 2019. The NYT has a large market and the IT has a small market.
https://www.abc.org.uk/Certificates/49619706.pdf
The average daily print circulation was 54,147 but that was pre-Covid. The shift to a 24 hour news cycle really screwed the print news model of yesterday's news tomorrow. The Web effectively put print newspapers like the IT in direct competition with RTE and radio stations. It was the IT's bungled first paywall that effectively surrendered its dominance of the Irish online news market to RTE and the Indo. It was a classic Conditional Access problem of the type that Pay TV channels had to solve through the 1990s and early 2000s. (Let's just say that I have a very particular set of skills when it comes to CA.) The problem was that the IT didn't use people who understood it as a CA problem and treated it as a "Field Of Dreams" problem.
Apart from the columnists and some investigative or specialist journalism, the IT has run into the problem of getting people to pay for original content when much of each edition is not completely original. (Newspapers use wire services (Reuters, AP etc) and syndicated content as well as generating their own content and news coverage.) The lower digital subscription prices are lower than buying a daily copy. A full subscription (premium) including print newspaper delivery is €767 a year. The lowest digital subscription is €156 a year. The ABC certifications do not break down the subscriptions by type or length. The print side of the business is declining but the digital side is not replacing it. While Digital does not have the costs associated with printing and distribution, it still has production costs.
On the Substack issue, most journalists could not sustain a publication on their own. The ones that can are generally exceptionally good. The problem, as always, is getting people to pay.
Regards...jmcc
Post edited by jmcc on1 -
I agree with you on the market imitations of the IT, I was typing when you posted about recycled press releases which I also agree with. I do think that timing is important, however. I think consumers are transitioning from a content is free mindset to more of an appreciation that you are paying one way or the other, either ads pre-content, your data or subs. Once again, this is more a global view than strictly Ireland. Also, this isn't a journey which is nearly over but compared to 15 years ago I would say a good distance has been covered. The Huffington Post is really an example of the former era with The Athletic more a reflection of the current mindset.
On the Substack stuff I think it comes down to niche and people carving out areas that are very focused on. Whether the majority of that is real, traditionally trained journalists or guys that write about stuff like finance, fashion and Warhammer etc. because that is their main interest is anyone's guess.
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One of the media organisations I works for charges for any stories involving a job promotion or announcement. I am not talking about about a company announcing new jobs but a company announcing Mr Joe Bloggs has become the Marketing Director of xyzzy.
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It's advertorial. For big announcements, publications can squeeze some extra advertisng out them. The local newspapers are very good at it. Arguably, it is a kind of births, engagements and marriages section for businesses. The former journos in the PR companies know how to pitch stories and which journalists are likely to run them.
Regards...jmcc
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HuffPo got a break as a content farm (simple articles aimed at search engines queries and filled with PPC ads). The problem was that one of Google's "modifications" to its algorithm killed off a lot of that clickbait content and content farms as a viable business model. Many such sites lost search engine traffic as a result of these modifications. In some respects, the development of HuffPo and other such sites was replicating wihat AOL had did with its content model in the 1990s. It was no suprise to see AOL purchasing Huffington Post in 2011 but the problem was that AOL had, for much of the time, a captive audience of subscribers. Publications like HuffPo did not. The job losses in 2019 seemed to target areas that may not have been converting well in terms of advertising.
Getting back to the IT and the Irish market, the IT's biggest problem is actually that of a reborn IN&M. Under O'Reilly and O'Brien, IN&M had no digital strategy and its Sindo/Indo website was a disaster in terms of Information Architecture. There was no timeline of articles and everything was stuck in an eternal now. One of the main assets of any online publication is its historical content and IN&M just wasn't using it.
When Mediahuis bought IN&M, it installed a new content management system and a paywall. Mediahuis has experience with making people pay for news content. The difference between the Indo and the IT when it comes to premium content shows this. With the Indo, the premium content has a blurb of about two paragraphs and a subscription button. The IT has no such sales pitch. What makes the IN&M sales pitch so lethal to the IT is that it provides a hook for readers to subscribe. The IT's landing page for "premium content" is nothing more than an "amn't I great" page. Without a hook, the only thing that the IT has left is a fading reputation and an expectation that readers will subscribe because it is the IT. the problem for the IT and a lot of other publications is that it is a buyer's market. People will pay for specialist content but the problem for the IT, and other Irish newspapers, is that it is not specialised enough. One of the examples of specialist content online that seems to be working is The Currency (thecurrency.news) but it has a very clearly defined market. The IT, by comparison, is generalist.
Regards...jmcc
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Advertorial is clearly identified as such in the main media outlets. In trade papers, it can e little harder to spot, but it is generally understood that significant parts of the content are supported by advertisers.
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Define relatively recently 1986 was 36 years ago Conor Brady.
He was employed as a reporter in 1969 so 53 years.
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The timing aspect is crucial when it comes to understanding why the IT's first paywall failed. There was no mobile web as such in May 2002. Even the launch of the .MOBI TLD (domain names specifically aimed at mobile device websites. That TLD was effectively nuked by Apple's choice of .com as the default ending for domain name and some problems in the domain name business where over a billion domain names were registered and deleted without any cost) and the iPhone were years away. The market was limited to desktops and laptops with dial-up Internet access. (This added to the cost of reading the IT online.) Quantifying that market would have been difficult because most PCs in the target market would have been family desktops or laptops and would have been shared. Buying the print edition would have been a lot easier for people. With the launch of the iPhone in 2007 and the advent of mobile Internet access, things changed. The quality of and size of the screen on mobile devices also improved and low-cost tablets with WiFi access also hit the market. That multiplied the size of the market as people began to have their own personal smartphone or tablet.
Regards...jmcc
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I think the papers are terrified of a handful of activists on twitter calling them names and thats partly why nothing that could be controversial gets investigated. If you look at the trans issue, the Irish Times has really steered away from it since the boycott by the trans writers union. Colette Colfer's piece was pulled from publication at the last minute in the IT earlier in the year. https://twitter.com/ColetteColfer/status/1518536282477142017
Broadsheet (RIP) published it https://www.broadsheet.ie/author/colette-colfer/https://www.broadsheet.ie/2022/04/26/colette-colfer-a-new-religion/
The Independent who have published a few articles in the last few weeks about trans women in womens sport and the misgivings Irish Doctors are having about the children being sent for treatment in England (gone from 20% having autism to 90% in a few years) and were subject to a protest outside their offices this weekend https://www.independent.ie/irish-news/trans-and-intersex-pride-protest-held-at-mediahuis-offices-41941435.html
Thats the sacred caste their at least mildly covering, think of all the others that they refuse to cover. I don't think I've ever seen something like a full scale investigations into the NGO industrial complex. How much is actually spent on certain groups and how have their outcomes changed in the years that the NGO's have been "helping".
Do you think any newspaper would run a story akin to the what the Sunday Times (I think ) ran exposing Pamela Izevbekhai? They don't want to ask certain questions they percieve to be inconvenient or will damage their chances at fuuture employment,
I think some of it is down to whos entering journalism. It used to be a job that people would just go into and learn on the job whereas now you need a degree and maybe a masters and then some internships, it puts off people who would be good at getting stories because they would be more working class and have connections from working a beat, knowing people in an area etc. Also people who have been through University in the last few years tend to be on the woke side.
I think the IT never thought about the price elasticity of demand when they raised their prices year on year. It went from being a daily thing to a treat, €3,50 for the weekend version and €2.40 for the daily. My parents used to buy it every day and now just buy the Sunday Times. I understand pushing digital for younger people but for older people who wouldn't do the digital edition, it seems silly to price them out of being consumers, prices haven't risen at the levels their prices have
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The national newspapers are a joke at this stage, e.g. if I want to read the latest on the Ukranian refugee status I have to read the Ukrainian thread here which links to actual news and situations reported in regional outlets for Kildare and Donegal, heavens above that would be reported nationally.
National newspapers report, OMG we have Ukranians in tents, feck all about the situation.
BTW, I'm only giving an example of how crap national newspapers are.
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To be fair to the IT I always got the impression that they preferred to be right with the details of a report, than first out the door with it. Also, there's a lot more to newspaper reporting than investigative journalism. Or you could say all reporting is investigative to some extent. If traditional media is on the way out, then who is going to do bread and butter work like court reporting for example, or even the kind of journalism like the article below, which makes some effort to unpack the energy blame game that is happening at the moment.
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Agree that the IT should have a role but it has lost its way. Currently the IT is effectively a division of FFG marketing team and so is complicit for the state we're in.
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The Irish times misrepresented a behavioural research project as a poll,and then misrepresented the data aswell.......fairly massive breech of ethics tbh there
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