'The news industry is not like coalmining, or car assembly, or turning out plastic buckets," Conor Brady, the former editor of the The Irish Times, said recently. Rather it is "an indispensable part of the democratic process".

But even if journalists and other news production workers agree that their business is not like coalmining, car assembly or the plastic bucket trade, they may yet have cause to regret one particular way in which it is not: these businesses are still on speaking terms with the concept of economies of scale.

Scale itself, or rather the lack of it, has always been a revenue-constraint for indigenous Irish media companies . Media companies that depend solely on advertising revenues for income, media companies with high overheads and low margins and media companies that are both of those things need a degree of scale to make a profit.

The newspaper industry’s old business model may have gone the way of “magnetic videotape and the horse and buggy”, as Brady put it, but the new model remains elusive “not just here in Ireland, but particularly in other small countries which do not have the economies of scale that apply in larger markets”.

Operating on an island with a population of 6.4 million constrains not just media companies’ revenues, but their choice of new business models.

At RTÉ Digital's The Future is Mobile event last month, Gary Leyden, director of the National Digital Research Centre's Launchpad scheme, admitted he "struggled" with some of the app monetisation models that came across his desk. App developers planning to offer gaming apps for free and make money from the 3-4 per cent of users sucked into making in-app purchases can only make this work if 3-4 per cent of the total user base is a decent number.

“You need scale,” Leyden reminded everyone, adding: “We almost throw our eyes to heaven when people say our monetisation model is advertising.”

But if Irish digital start-ups suffer from scale delusions, they're not the only ones. At any standard, navel-gazing "future of media" conference, it is not uncommon to hear speakers invoke what the New York Times is doing, what MailOnline is up to and whichever planet Guardian.co.uk is on as if their various survival strategies can be automatically applied to the Irish news market.

In any case, globalising, scale-chasing media outfits with “time-zone” site editors such as Guardian.co.uk (soon to be Guardian.com) also acknowledge that advertising cannot become their sole revenue stream. Even as it waxed lyrical about “open journalism” on the web, Guardian News and Media poured cash into paid apps.

The car assembly line and mining businesses (in certain parts of the world) continue to benefit from economies of scale that they have achieved through investment in new technology. The difference between the technological innovation of those industries and the word innovation as it is sometimes applied to news groups’ digital ventures is that carmakers and miners control the technology that revolutionised their industries. Print news companies do not.

Definition time: economies of scale occur when the average cost of producing a single unit – such as a copy of a newspaper – falls when output is increased. This worked well for news groups in the age where the printing press was the dominant means of access to information: print more, sell more, make more margin. But news groups began to lose the ability to exploit such technical economies of scale when they ceded control of the internet to tech giants.

Can they ever get it back? No doubt Guardian.co.uk, MailOnline and others can achieve certain managerial efficiencies through their expansions. But in the digital age, meaningful economies of
scale are not readily attainable.

Smaller news companies trapped in more modest markets must distinguish themselves from “identikit” news – as Michael D Higgins called it this week – by pursuing their niche. For Irish news groups, that niche is Irish news. But such “local” news production, almost by definition, does not scale. Awkwardly, it weighs down the balance sheet instead.

If controlling new technology is one way to achieve economies of scale, loss of control can contribute to its converse: diseconomies of scale.

Diseconomies of scale occur when average unit costs start to rise when output increases. Expect to hear the phrase applied with increasing regularity to the print news industry in the years ahead, accompanied by announcements of cuts in print distribution.

Producing news is not like moulding nicely exportable and democratically inconsequential plastic buckets – more’s the pity, sometimes.