Flamboyant publisher John Ryan may have bitten off more than he could chew when he launched two dog-lover magazines in the US, but he insists he'll live to fight again, writes Shane Hegarty.
It's been a rough week for publisher John Ryan. Following a couple of years in which his mutt magazines The New York Dogand The Hollywood Dogwere feted by the US media and marvelled at by a baffled Irish public, it appears certain that his dream of building a publishing empire has crumbled.
There had been reports of problems at his company, Gatsby Publishing, since he e-mailed staff at the end of April to tell them they should find other work until he was in a position to revive the dormant publications. New York Dog'swebsite domain name lapsed and, in the meantime, Ryan's website, Blogorrah - which had become a mini-phenomenon for its joyful evisceration of the more trivial elements of Irish culture - has been updated only twice since mid-June. Both of those updates carried promises that the site would return soon.
But this week Ryan found himself caught in the web, when online magazine Dig and Scratchpublished an article repeating serious allegations made by two former Gatsby employees. And, as Ryan sought to set the record straight through the comments boxes of several blogs, the rest of the media immediately pricked up its ears.
"Maybe this is karma for Blogorrah," Ryan admits. "The minute I saw it I thought, f***, the internet is biting me on the arse. There's absolutely no control. No matter how cogent you are they'll say, 'no, you definitely threw those dogs in the river'."
Ryan had left Dublin for New York following the publishing disaster that was Stars on Sunday, a "newspaper without news", whose copy comprised of pictures, captions and ads. There were not enough of the latter, and while Stars on Sundayarrived with a bang in 2003, it fizzled out within four months.
It hadn't been Ryan's first failure. His gay magazine, GI, had gained headlines for a publicity campaign that featured two kissing GAA players, but advertisers remained shy.
Yet by then Ryan had already been partly responsible for some of the most remarkable successes of recent Irish publishing. In 1999, he and business partner Michael O'Doherty launched VIPmagazine, a celebrities and weddings fiesta that was frowned upon by the serious press but devoured by the largely female readership. The template had been lifted almost entirely from Hello!,but their foresight came not just in pinching the right idea, but adapting it for an Irish market. VIPmixed prurience with cheesiness, glamour with gaudiness, and became an icon of Celtic Tiger Ireland.
Ryan and O'Doherty followed by taking on the biggest magazine in the country, the RTÉ Guide, with their TV Now. And while that hasn't toppled the giant, it has given it a serious bruising. TV Now still sells strongly.
In 2001, though, Ryan sold his share in both magazines to O'Doherty before moving on to GIand Stars on Sunday. It was following those failures, and the schadenfreude that his problems and his persona - swaggering, charming, risk-taker - engendered in the rival press, that Ryan decided he would leave the "malice" of home and take on a fresh start in New York.
His final act in Ireland was captured in a 2003 documentary, Any Given Sunday, which followed the inglorious collapse of Stars on Sunday. The film revealed a self-awareness that pre-empts anything the press will say about him. "Listen, if I was to see me on the street I wouldn't be crazy about me," Ryan smiled. "I'd say, 'well, he's just a wanker, a total wanker'."
And off he went to New York, where, while walking in Central Park, he met a woman who was grieving for her dog, and he realised that there was a gap in the market for a magazine about dogs. Not just any magazine: a Vanity Fair for dog lovers. With celebrity dogs, doggy fashion ("Queer eye for the scruffy dog"), doggy obituaries, "doggyscopes" and features that asked "Is your dog bipolar?" It was near-genius, a crazy idea carried off in such a deadpan manner that dog lovers could take it as seriously as everyone else could enjoy the joke.
It's almost two years since Ryan last came sniffing about the Irish public consciousness, when a documentary tracking the launch of Hollywood Dogwas shown on RTÉ. The sight of Ryan carrying Winky, his one-eyed chihuahua, didn't fail to catch the attention. He also appeared on The Late Late Showwith a stand-in pooch (Winky couldn't get a visa), giving the tabloids a few column inches and one Sunday paper hundreds of them.
"I think if you do anything in Ireland you open yourself up to ridicule," he admits. "Do I regret it? Look, I've loads of regrets. Appearing on the Late Late with a one-eyed dog does not appear large on my list. And I thought the documentary was very smart. It may have seemed to be just about me, but it was actually two thirds about the dog thing in America. It's regrettable that, whatever I'm involved with, there's a negative connotation taken up in Ireland."
RYAN JOKINGLY POINTS out Ireland's ambiguous regard for eejits, saying that if one particular Irish celebrity walked onstage with a parrot perched on his most intimate parts, "the country would be in rapture". What he does regret, though, is the manner in which the dog publications have hit the rocks. It was, he admits, "bad business" not to request advertising revenue up front. From early on, it was clear that collecting payments would be an arduous task, but he says that the problem became insurmountable when a safety scare hit the dog food industry in March.
"The books are there. We're not hiding anything. We ran into cashflow problems because we couldn't collect from advertisers. A lot of them have gone out of business. In Ireland, it's smaller. If they didn't return your calls you'd probably run into them in the street. But here, they're in Arizona, Utah or they're out in Alaska. So, if they just don't choose to answer your calls, you've got to go legal. And that's $400 or $500 per letter. And when it's only $1,000, that's hardly worth your while. So we had to write off thousands of dollars." A collection agency is chasing $110,000 (€81,505) of the $250,000 (€185,240) he says he's owed.
"We occasionally get a $600 cheque. But it's very slow and people are on a payment schedule of $50 a month. It's very bad. Most of our advertisers were mom-and-pop companies and independent companies. When the bills come in we're not an emergency, we're the last thing to be paid. And my problem is I wasn't prepared for the sheer bad debts."
Ryan was the target of further accusations from what Dig and Scratchsays are ex- employees. The most vocal of these have threatened legal action, with one advertising executive claiming: "The demise wasn't because advertisers wouldn't pay. The demise was because the business acumen of publisher John Ryan is a disaster."
Staff are owed at least a month's pay, and there have since been subsequent allegations, from what Dig and Scratchsays are other former employees. However, as he chases the debts, Ryan remains optimistic that an investor will take the title off his hands. "I'm committed and determined to pay the staff every single penny. Genuinely there are people still interested in doing something with it. The biggest challenge for us was to get it to market. For another company to do that would cost someone about a million, so we've already done that, which makes us attractive. And our debts aren't that much either."
Once that's done, he says that he's likely to get out of publishing altogether, although he insists that Blogorrah, which he ran with journalist Derek O'Connor, will return as promised.
However, as his friend Trevor White, publisher of the Dublinermagazine, reminded us this week, when Ryan left for New York people wished him well, saying "you're too big for Dublin". Unfortunately for Ryan, it seems that New York has proved too big for him.