Media & Marketing/Emmet Oliver: Cuts in costs at the Sunday Tribune have reduced losses at the company to €3.3 million for 2005, but the paper is still sitting on accumulated losses of €43 million.
Accounts for the company just lodged with the Companies Office show turnover of €11.1 million for 2005, but a pre-tax loss of €3.3 million,down from €8.4 million the previous year.
Clearly the company has discovered a new level of financial discipline under managing director Michael Roche. In its last accounting period (the 18 months to the end of 2004) the company had costs of €22.3 million, but this has been drastically cut back to €12.6 million, a 43 per cent drop. On a pro-rata basis costs were down to €15.8 million.
Chairman of the newspaper Gordon Colleary confidently predicts in the chairman's statement a return to profit, but no date for this is given. This is understandable when one considers the years of losses that have mounted up at the paper, where Independent News and Media holds a 29.9 stake.
Mr Colleary says costs at the company were reaching "unsustainable" levels as recently as 2004 and clearly some serious financial surgery has been performed. However in the ultra competitive Sunday market, where the Sunday Times and Sunday Business Post have been building up their sales, the paper may be ill-equipped to take on that challenge.
If the costs had continued growing, there were suggestions in media reports IN&M might have withdrawn its support as a shareholder, but there is no sign of this in the latest accounts, where IN&M advanced loans of €4 million to the paper. This works out as approximately €333,000 per month for the Tribune from IN&M. These secured loans bore an interest rate of 4 per cent.
The paper's circulation in the period between July and December 2005 was 71,808, one of its lowest sales in many years. This left it approximately 35,000 copies behind the Sunday Times and just over 20,000 copies ahead of the Sunday Business Post.
The paper will be content to see its annual losses being trimmed back successfully, but with rivals spending additional sums on their papers, the Tribune could still struggle to make any circulation momentum in current market conditions.
World Cup women
As the World Cup moves into the quarter finals stage, it is notable that viewing figures for the event are changing radically, but in other ways staying the same.
The big change for Germany 2006 is the number of female viewers. Global figures suggest that 39 per cent of all viewers on average are women. This far surpasses the tends of previous competitions.
While the gender changes are interesting, in Ireland the trends are a little more predictable. England games have been popular for many years in Ireland and this is not changing. So far, according to figures circulated by the Dublin advertising agency Initiative the most popular game was Sweden -v- England which managed to draw in 539,000 viewers.
The agency has also been monitoring what channels Irish people have been watching and unsurprisingly RTÉ is the bigger winner there with 77 per cent of viewers tuning into Bill O'Herlihy and panel. Of the UK stations, the loyalty of Irish viewers was to the BBC which got 58 per cent of those channel hopping, with UTV getting the remainder. While lots of women are tuning in, the figures suggest the men tuning in are a little older this time around, 65 per cent of male viewers are over 35.
Reporters file video
Journalists all over the world are used to filing copy under pressure. For years copy has been filed for the next day's paper editions and in more recent times copy has been filed to online news services. But UK publisher, Johnson Press, which owns Irish titles such as the Kilkenny People, Longford Leader, Leitrim Observer, Tipperary Star and the Nationalist, has added a new layer of reporting for its staff to tackle.
The company, which owns 300 papers, plans to convert 70 of its UK newsrooms into multimedia operations where reporters file video reports as well as written stories. A trial is taking place at the Lancashire Evening Post where journalists file video reports for streaming on the newspaper's websites. Newsdesks at the company's papers will now have to co-ordinate rolling new coverage over the Internet, mobile phone and newspaper. This is already common practice in news wire companies like Reuters and television companies like CNN. But it would be a new phenomenon among mainstream Irish media.
It is understood the new system has not been introduced to the company's Irish operations, but watch this space.
Godly Mammon
Who said money and religion don't mix? Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation has purchased a 25 per cent stake in TV Puls, a small Polish terrestrial broadcaster.
The station is owned by a Franciscan brotherhood and focuses partially on religious content.
"The brotherhood has invited News Corp to work with us as an investor," Polish newspapers quoted the TV Puls chief executive, Father Zdzislaw Dzido, as saying.
"The intention of the partners is to maintain the family and Christian character of the station," he added.
Emmet Oliver can be contacted at eoliver@irish-times.ie
