The decline continues

JTMan wrote: »

Yeah, paywall early next year apparently. Equally struggle to see how it can succeed.

Looking at some of their content, I'd nearly want payment for reading it, never mind a paywall.

INM are to shut their CityWest print plant.

I think most people saw that coming but the fact that Irish Times have not won the contract is unusual. The print contract is going to be given a mix of 3rd party companies and use their smaller Newry plant.

INM says it will also break up some of its printing requirements into smaller contracts for third-party printing companies. It is understood that The Irish Times, which also operates a printing plant in Citywest close to the INM facility, is highly unlikely to take on any of the work.

Talks between INM and The Irish Times over a potential printing arrangement were held earlier this year, but are understood to have petered out. Management at The Irish Times declined to comment.

IRE60 wrote: »

Newry, isn't the smallest plant in the world - relative to whats needed now. Celtic might pick up a bit. WebPrint in Cork as well - although the distribution equation might have to be tweaked.

WebPrint have been mentioned in reports but Celtic have not. Celtic need a deal like this after the loss of the Mirror contract. It surely makes distribution less streamlined if INM are using multiple printers.

The Irish Times are speculating, the obvious, that this is far from the end of the cuts.

IRE60 wrote: »

SBP bought Irish Studio - huge amount of brands - perhaps a little 'last week's

https://irishstudio.com/brands

Remember when Irish Central bought World Irish (the dotbomb idea to have a Facebook for Irish people but without any clue about how to do it and technologically ignorant rubbish about building a web directory by people who had never built one which didn't even make it out of the starting gate.). Then again, the Irish Times decided to sell/lease ireland.com and lose the biggest Irish category killer domain name.

Some nice brands that could be appicised but the magazine market is a tough one.

Regards...jmcc

JTMan wrote: »

Scale and economy of scale in the name of the game but scale will only give legacy old media print titles a slight extension in remaining life.

I bet kilcullen will lose his shirt on this gamble. He seems to be away with the fairies, as noted earlier in this thread, with his pie in the sky aspirations to target the SBP to a global audience. Also, his belief that these magazines will have a digital future is again away with the fairies, digital magazines, apart from a small number of exceptions are not selling.

The SBP is going downhill fast as well

jmcc wrote: »

Finding out that Ireland is a small market when it comes to niche digital publishing? Or just declining in terms of quality and reporting with more Op-Ed bloviating than reporting?

Regards...jmcc

The latter

The former true also, and latter will accelerate decline

The decline has me out. What was once 100% of my work (newspaper advertising) is now less than 1% of my work. Fortunately I kept up-skilling and retained old skills that are still relevant.

On the plus side... no more late nights getting retail newspaper ads over the line. Particularly this time of the year.

IRE60 wrote: »

Oh John_Rambo - our paths possibly crossed! Yes, getting blood from a stone around Christmas and the ****ing ever changing deadline/publishing dates.

On a more telling note Sebastian Hamilton group Ed of the Mail here took redundancy! Has he the 'seeing eye'!

Irish daily circulation down near 25K. He must have asked himself, as Kenneth Williams did at the end of his last diary, what's the bloody point?

Just finishing writing book on gTLD (.COM etc) domain names and web usage. The Irish Times actually made it into the book in a good way. It apparently bought the ireland.com domain name in 1997 for £10,000 (thought the price was closer to $7000) and sold it in 2012 for 450,000 Euro. Might need a few more sales like that to pay for the MyHome.ie thing but otherwise, the whole online business seems to have cost it millions. The Indo seems to be pulling everything behind a prototype paywall. Its new owners are going to have to do a lot of because it wasn't designed with Information Architecture in mind and archive copies tends to be a nice little earner for publications.

Regards...jmcc

Washington Post article here on the ongoing decline of local newspapers in the US.

IRE60 wrote: »

Business post has a new look - not a massive departure from the last.....

Newspapers always seem to do a redesign when they are losing readers. Looked at the other day but the rate at which business news changes means that the long-form journalism is a lot more difficult to sell these days and there's a generation maturing that's been effectively brought up with clickbait churnalism.

The attention span has been shortened due to the Internet and it has probably caused problems with people being able to focus enough to read long articles. As a publication, the SBP might be better suited to a "Daily Me" format on the web or via e-mail. The problem with that kind of approach is that it immediately limits the amount of advertising that can be sold because it is fracturing an already small market.

Regards...jmcc

this one became a meme

https://twitter.com/EricBoehm87/status/1206728178728865795