PRESENT TENSE:FROM THE OUTSIDE the first sign that it was to be a bad week for the Sunday Tribunecame with word that Independent News & Media would be making a statement on Tuesday afternoon. Just as the Dáil was being dissolved and a general election called. Sharp timing.
As word filtered out of an impending staff meeting, and then receivership, there was shock among colleagues – not necessarily about the outcome but because it's a small town and a small industry and many journalists have either worked for the Tribuneat some point or know several who still do.
If the receiver fails to find a buyer, many good people will be pushed into a shrinking market, one into which journalism graduates are already being shovelled at a ferocious rate.
But, of course, step aside from sentiment and it becomes just another failing business in a failing economy, one that didn’t make a profit even during the good years. It had been redesigned and changed format but still lost a fifth of its sales in only a year, and it struggled even before the bubble of advertising burst. For all the goodwill and talk of shrinking media diversity, the greatest surprise was that Independent News Media kept it afloat as a bulwark against its competitors for so long.
It means that when the next Audit Bureau of Circulations figures, covering the second half of 2010, are released, in a fortnight, two newspapers will be absent, following last month's announcement of the closure of the Irish Daily Star Sunday. The results for everyone else are unlikely to be good, although the coming months will see the surviving Sundays try to gain from the Tribune's misfortune. But the last figures, covering January to June 2010, saw every national newspaper – dailies and Sundays – post a year-on-year decline in circulation.
In the UK’s most recent circulation figures every national newspaper also saw a year-on-year fall.
Look at the losses being posted by some Irish newspapers, as sales and advertising graphs head in a solid direction, and there seems little doubt that other newspapers will collapse. This is a trend, local and global, that goes beyond the recession.
Sales and advertising will not recover proportionately even in the event of a sudden economic turnaround. This is a market in transition not between boom, bust and boom again but between a newsprint and a post-newsprint age.
It is not just that many younger people get their news elsewhere, because that trend increasingly crosses the age groups even if more traditional reading habits assert themselves at weekends. What with those fundamental changes in readership habits and the evolution of technology, surviving newspapers will have to figure out not just how to remain vital to an Irish public that will still crave news but also how to do that in a world that no longer wants to receive it on inky paper.
And it’s not purely that they can get their news for free online: it’s that the web has developed to be exceptionally effective at bringing the news directly to them.
If it matters they will be told about it. Yet that hunger for information remains voracious, so the future for Irish media is about who will understand that space best, feed it, learn from it and ultimately figure out just how to earn from it.
While the world’s newspaper market faces its current crisis, there has always been the question of what differences might emerge in Ireland, a smaller market, encroached by UK titles but in which newspaper readership has traditionally been high.
The answer, typically, is that we’re not that different from everywhere else and that there is a confluence of trends that will prove catastrophic for some Irish newspapers but provide an opportunity for others.
There is nothing new in wailing about the death of the newspaper. A particular worldwide newspaper extinction timeline (online, of course) gives Ireland until 2027 before newspapers become insignificant.
And while it is all too easy to become hysterical about the present, and doom-laden about the future, it seems clear that we’re entering the end stages of newspapers as we have known them in this country.
But it is only the medium that could be extinct, not the message. It will thrive in Ireland and in many formats. As a comparison, Waterstone’s will close two big Dublin branches in the week that sales of digital books overtook those of physical copies on Amazon. We’re seeing a transitional phase in a media evolution. Many people might feel a sentimental attachment to printed books, but it hardly matter what they like now: it’s what people will like in 10 or 20 years that is now important.
Also this week, Rupert Murdoch revealed his €20 million iPad paper, The Daily, which is another wager on the future of the newspaper.
Maybe it is the future. Maybe it is another false prophecy. Either way, sentimentality will keep nobody afloat.
