The "Irish Times" and the case of missing domestic investigative journalism

Don Henley described it best.

I suspect few people under 40 buy one newspaper,let alone read it cover to cover.

I think newspapers are going the way of museums. People who are interested in detailed analysis are getting it online through specific websites and channels. So newspapers have to dilute their content to cater for the casually interested.

Journalists have adopted a style thats less factual and more opinion based and (my biggest gripe) are getting these opinions from whoever is trending on twitter.

Like The Guardian begging for donations every time you visits it's site.

The IT went down the rabbit hole of "opinion" in the 1990s. It was cheaper than real news and journalism. It became more of a viewspaper than a newspaper. As for the technology section back then, it had some good journos initially but really declined after those journos moved away from covering technology. The cheerleading for the DotCom bubble was only ever going to end one way. As for the property bubble, the IT became a bunch of property ads separated by some news and opinion pieces. The IT did some good investigative journalism in the past. The problem is that the Irish situation is incredibly hostile to good investigative journalism and the first reaction of the subjects is generally the threat of defamation proceedings. It still has some good journalists but Irish journalism isn't quite like journalism in other countries. The decline in the print newspaper model has made newspapers incredibly dependent on advertising and one of the biggest advertisers in recent years was the government. The last thing that newspapers want to do is to piss off their largest advertisers. Some of the smaller publications like The Village Magazine and On The Ditch have put the larger publications to shame in the way that they have broken major stories in recent years.

Regards...jmcc

The Guardian is depressing to read. Really, it's awful what's happening in the world. They've got the balls to cover it. It's fantastic journalism at times. Wide and deep. Often it goes so woke you'd puke. It's all free, so they're not making any money there. Really I'm a bollox for not paying for a subscription.

Not sure any Irish Journalism exists anymore. It's all property porn and lifestyle stuff that's been scraped off the Web. RTE should be doing more since they have a ton of money from license payers and advertising revenue. But we mostly get property porn and lifestyle stuff from them too.

They did a great report on how 10 billion euro found its way out of the Irish economy back in 2020, due to the lack of cyber-security and protocol.

They have also done some investigative stuff surrounding the Covid 'bonuses' that the GP's were getting for every triage back when the pandemic was in full swing.

They also had some figures on how much the cyber attacks from 2021 were costing the country, that I have not seen reported anywhere else.

To be honest, I think they're fairly good at following the money in domestically dubious stories.

Yeah that is always the worry. I feel as though the whole 'zero accountability for anybody who works for the state' thing, has reached a point where something will give and things will change. You can only afford to abuse power for so long before you are weakened and become vulnerable. That's the way things are going in politics- and if that weren't enough, a general rule of thumb is if the politicians are letting go of money, you know something is gone wrong!

The IT has some great journalists and as a fellow hack I would trust the IT way over the Indo. The IT may have slightly lost its way but it still has great journalists such as Karlin Lillington, Fintan O'Toole, Ronan McGreevy and Ciara O'Brien.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.