Does the Irish Times have a future?

13-08-2021 11:23pm

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117741349#Comment_117741349

"Husband not getting along with the inlaws"

I am SHOCKED 😀

14-08-2021 12:25am

Big uptake in their online subscription service. Which is good to see. Strong and impartial journalism is a cornerstone of democracy.

I didn't renew it last year as I decided to go with The Currency instead, and I already had a sub with the Indo and my local paper. The Currency is doing some brilliant work at the moment. Proper deep investigative journalism.

riclad · 14-08-2021 1:55am

I think every newspaper is at risk since gen z reads news online , the sales of physical papers are falling . The guardian is competing with 1000s of free websites social media tik Tok YouTube its been asking for donations for years reporting on politics and current affairs is expensive and not covered by advertising the guardian can't just run articles based on celeb gossip and images of sexy celebs taken from social media like the daily mail

It's audience are Liberal middle class highly educated people newspapers have Paywalls and subscriptions

70 per cent of subs are received by the new York Times or the wall street journal

Sunny Disposition · 20-08-2021 10:55am

https://www.irishtimes.com/business/media-and-marketing/operating-profit-at-irish-times-climbs-to-8-3m-after-surge-in-paid-subscribers-1.4634152

With the number of subscribers growing, the IT definitely has a future, that's not in doubt. It took a lot of media companies a long time to move away from the online free model, even though it never worked for them.

Mad_maxx · 20-08-2021 12:22pm

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/111868731#Comment_111868731

The Irish Times is far too impeccably middle class to ever go far left or support the likes of SF

It's for people who adore Michael D or Mary Robinson or Colm o Gorman but like a nice comfortable view when they look out their window, in that sense, it's thoroughly establishment

Marcos · 20-08-2021 1:54pm

The self styled "paper of record" is nothing of the sort. Maybe people here don't remember their disgraceful behaviour 10 years ago with the Kate Fitzgerald scandal, crudely altering an article that she wrote talking about depression in the workplace before her death. Afterwards, once it became clear that her employers were the Communications Clinic, run by Terry Prone the online article was changed to remove any reference to the Communications Clinic. Much to the dismay of her parents who backed every word that Kate wrote. The only organ that covered the story in depth was broadsheet.ie. All other publications kept silent and looked the other way. As Tom Fitzgerald her father said when he asked why there was almost complete silence on the subject, he was told that in Irish media "one hand washes the other." The Irish Times eventually apologised to her family for their actions.

Irish media is a small world where everyone knows each other and many journalists are embedded with politicians and the establishment. They socialise together and work in tandem with each other planting stories in the media that are basically glorified press releases. Journalists know that if they play ball then there is the chance of a well paid gig as government special adviser down the line. Look at how many ex journalists are now government adivsers? Because of this most journalists are unlikely to bring up anything that will cause establishment figures any discomfort. Look at how no journalist is trying to get a full list of those who attended Catherine Zappone's shindig in the Merrion Hotel, was there anyone from the Irish Times there? So any stories that will be broken are more likely to be broken by foreign owned publication who have a different editorial line to locally owned papers like the Indo did until D'OB was ousted.

Like other posters have said, if you want your safe space, then the Irish Times is for you, if you want to read investigative journalism that's likely to break stories then look elsewhere. The Sunday Times has broken stories that the likes of the Irish Times has avoided, it's also cheaper at €9.99 a month. This isn't an ad for them, but that's who I subscribed to. I haven't seen the currency yet, but I'll take a look and see. Does anyone have any other recommendations?

jippo nolan · 20-08-2021 6:38pm

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117780445#Comment_117780445

Nail on head!

tdf7187 · 20-08-2021 7:02pm

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117743320#Comment_117743320

Agreed. Including on the vastly overrated Miriam Lord.

Historybluff · 21-08-2021 2:38pm

I think the Irish Times does have a future. It's still the best newspaper in the county, in my opinion. Some posters here have objected to the newspaper's liberal-left ideology. Fair enough, but it's the paper's right to have whatever ideology it wants. And not every opinion writer on the paper is liberal-left: Pat Leahy, Stephen Collins, Brenda O'Brien, and Cliff Taylor, to name a few, seem quite centrist, if not centre-right to me. Anyway, more centrist or centre-right papers like the Irish Independent, the Irish Examiner, or the Sunday Times might prove more congenial for disgruntled posters.

I agree though that there has been a decline in quality in the Times over the last five to ten years. I keep meaning to compare an issue of the paper with an issue on the same date twenty, maybe thirty years ago, just to see the difference between them. I think you'd find that there's a lot more opinion pieces in the paper nowadays and a lot less straight-forward factual reporting. That's a trend evident throughout the media globally unfortunately. An opinion-piece writer costs a newspaper a lot less than a journalist stationed in, say, Afghanistan. There's nothing wrong with opinion pieces per se, as events, trends etc. need to be analyzed to be understood properly. However, the quantity can be overwhelming. The content of those opinion pieces is a different matter.

And then there's the business model behind newspapers. As some posters have already mentioned, they have suffered badly from the rise of internet. A lot of the advertising that used to help fill newspaper coffers has migrated online. And, with younger people are less likely to read newspapers than older generations, their customer base is shrinking. Hence, I think, newspapers feel that to survive they have to attract as many readers as possible by having 'something for everyone in the audience'. As well as covering current affairs, business, and sport, they often have supplements on health, fashion, general lifestyle stuff etc. (I sometimes think the Irish Independent is a lifestyle publication with some current affairs attached.) And they give coverage to things that they would previously have dismissed as trivial nonsense, like celebrities and TV shows.

Overall, though, the Times is a good paper.

Does the Irish Times have a future?

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