Ireland on Sunday will vie with the Sunday Independent for a middle market readership not catered for by the other titles on the newspaper shelves, the managing director behind the new venture says.
Mr Ashley Balbirnie (39) has had 13 months experience with the Title, the sports paper, which will be a section in Ireland on Sunday, on sale for the first time tomorrow. After carving out a circulation of more than 29,000 with the Title, the management feels it can gain new readers while holding on to its present readers by charging 15p more than the Title's 85p. "They have to feel they are getting the Title and much more besides," he says. Ireland on Sunday is also after the readers who were left behind after the demise of the Sunday Press two years ago. "We do not regard the market as saturated. There are an awful lot of titles for the public to buy. But we would make the point very strongly that the traditional selling area is the middle market," he says. He sees that readership as being served only by the Sunday Independent, describing the Sunday Tribune and the Sunday Business Post as being "too highbrow" for those readers, while they are "uncomfortable" with the tabloids. "This is somebody looking for news - decent presentation of Irish and international news - who is very much interested in entertainment and sport. Those will be the three key areas. We cannot win the size battle so we have to be smarter and sharper."
Some disenchanted Irish readers, he believes, have engaged in import substitution and are rather unhappily buying some of the 370,000 English titles sold every Sunday. Editorially, he says the newspaper will be closer to the nationalist line of the Business Post than the Sunday Independent. Ireland on Sunday will have a green masthead because it is going to be "pro and positively Irish".
The venture has a £4 million investment behind it, after the chairman of Title Media Ltd, Mr Paschal Taggart, "led the charge in the fund-raising". It has a staff of 35 and a three-year period in which to establish itself. Instead of aiming for the traditional 100,000 circulation threshold, the new paper aims to double the Title's circulation. "We would be very happy if we settle down to 50,000 or 60,000 copies a week. We would like to be making profits, or at least breaking even, by the third year. We will be losing money for maybe two-and-a-half years," he says. The capital investment is small, only "a couple of hundred thousand pounds" for offices and a computer system. "The major investment is finding your working capital to sustain your earlier losses."
Mr Balbirnie, from Mount Merrion, Dublin, worked with the Jefferson Smurfit Group for more than 16 years, beginning on a graduate recruitment programme in 1979 and moving into various publishing positions as well as being personal assistant to Michael Smurfit for two years. He has worked on the Irish Voice newspaper and Irish America magazine in the US, and the Irish Post in London. Coming back to Dublin to raise his three sons with his wife, Ms Candy Lappin, he became involved with Mr Liam Hayes and Mr Cathal Dervan in launching the Title. "It has led to the most exciting year of my working career by some distance," he says.
