Ireland.com is the website for The Irish Times, with nearly 600,000 unique users around the world every month. "Ireland.com is regarded as the electronic arm of The Irish Times," says Deirdre Veldon, one of the journalists who works on the site. "The aim with the news, and the news values, is to be as similar as possible to The Irish Times. It is a breaking-news service" - that is, it can be constantly updated - "but in Irish Times style."
"We can also add various multimedia features, audio and video in particular, but that doesn't happen yet. "We also follow up some stories, choosing ourselves what we feel is of interest. Irish Times standards are upheld, but it is also appealing to a different section of the market: about half of the people who look at the paper on line would be overseas, possibly first or second generation Irish living abroad. More than half the users can't get the physical Irish Times on the day it comes out."
Journalists with ireland.com keep up with the news, but they generally don't make it. "We wouldn't as yet have the resources to send out reporters investigating, so we haven't had any scoops yet," Veldon says, "but we use the same sources of information as journalists working for the printed paper. We contact the emergency services, do a limited amount of court reporting, look at other sites, the TV, the radio, the people in the newsroom tip us off and we have our own sources. We go to the editorial conferences in The Irish Times and get copies of schedules which indicate what the newsroom will cover during the day." Unlike a printed paper, there are no space constraints, so it is possible to put up a huge amount of information.
"Some sections that we put up go into more depth that the printed paper. Sports is an example," Veldon explains. "We'd have a world-football site where we have the latest news and you can look up any player in any league, how many goals they've scored, etc - it's all set out on a database. It's a huge encyclopaedic source. "We also publish things like a 500-page report that the newspaper doesn't have room for. We'd do something like that in tandem with the paper, which would advertise that the report is available online."
Ireland.com has links to several sites of its own other than the newspaper. "We work on project sites too, such as the city guide or the weather site, developing them all the time. This week we're launching a Budget site. We also have discussion forums, which are very popular. People from all over the world submit their views on everything from how to celebrate Bloomsday to the introduction of the euro."
