newspapers & journalism indo

Vince76

My first post. Hope I dont break any rules.
I have been living overseas since early 2000. Since 2003 or 2004 I usually read some irish news on the indo on my phone or laptop. Me and my family and folks were avid indo readers through out the 70's 80's 90's... Over the last couple of years despite what I feel is a steady decline in quality I have soldiered on reading. Even silly things like spelling errors have become common place. It's hard to accept and move on. Lately I started reading rte.ie which is good for now.

Can anyone explain what happened to the indo ?

jmcc

Takeovers and the repackaging of Journalism as a degree subject. The major shareholder in IN&M was the O'Reilly family. Then Denis O'Brien decided to waste about 500 Million Euro on shares to become the major shareholder and oust O'Reilly. The problem was that when O'Brien was investing, it was during a major shift away from print newspapers.

There was also a shift away from people who learned their business through an apprenticeship. The production line colleges churned out people that were interchangable between being PR flacks and recycling press releases from PR flacks. There were some good journalists produced on those production lines but with the DotCom bubble and then the Property Bubble, there was a demand for these press release recyclers. Like many failing newspapers, the Indo started to rely more on commentary than reporting. This was a major error for newspapers because it coincided with the rise of the Internet over the last twenty years and on the Internet, everyone has at least one opinion. O'Brien had to sell his shares at a major loss (around 45 million Euro or so) as the Belgian Mediahuis firm bought IN&M in what was effectively a firesale.

Many people no longer buy a daily newspaper. The Irish Times once used to sell around 100K copies a day. Before the Covid pandemic, it was scraping around 50K print copies a day. Print newspapers were a victim of Covid as people stopped buying them due to fear of infection. The Indo figures may have declined as well. Many people have seen the unsold stacks of the Indo and the Sunday Independent.

RTE isn't very good and it has started to use newswire sevices (Reuters, AFP etc) to pad out its site. Some of that wireservice content is quite good. Both the Indo and the Irish Times have paywalls to try to make people pay for the content but they don't seem to be doing too well.

Regards...jmcc

Darc19

Irish times seems to be doing well on subscribers and is close to the 100,000 mark.

This has meant it's profitable and can keep decent journalistic standards

Certainly miles ahead of the indo which is trying to change its click bait image via the new owners

jmcc

Darc19 wrote: »

Irish times seems to be doing well on subscribers and is close to the 100,000 mark.

Press release with Social Science numbers? (No breakdown of the numbers by subscription duration, churn etc.)

This has meant it's profitable and can keep decent journalistic standards

Nice to see that it is finally innovating.

Regards...jmcc