Belfast's newcomers
By Paul Gosling Posted Jul 1 2005
Photo/Naomi Savage
Editor Greg Harkin reads through the new Belfast morning daily paper, Daily View. The paper aims to attract both Catholic and Protestant readers.
At the beginning of this year Northern Ireland had two morning newspapers. Today it has five, which serve a population of only 1.7 million.
The two original newspapers each targeted half of Northern Ireland’s divided society. On the Protestant/unionist/loyalist side was the News Letter, which has been in continuous circulation since 1737 and was the first European paper to publish the American Declaration of Independence. On the Catholic/nationalist/republican side was the Irish News.
Recently these have been joined by Daily Ireland, a republican paper, the Belfast Telegraph, a morning edition of the evening pro-unionist paper, and the Daily View, an entertainment-oriented tabloid that seeks to attract both Catholics and Protestants.
The sense of polarized journalism and polarized society is emphasized by almost all Northern Irish newspapers. A Catholic who picked up the News Letter might throw it down in either anger or indifference, though most Protestants would never look at the Irish News. The new morning papers are looking for their place on the spectrum but are finding the market crowded.
Ironically, growth in the number of papers comes at a time when total sales are dropping. As circulation of individual titles and total sales in Northern Ireland falls, more editions have been launched to protect advertising revenues.
This trend affects the established papers as well as the newcomers. Even the News Letter is struggling to survive with sales of 28,000 copies. Its current editor, Austin Hunter, was brought in a year ago to revive it with a mission to make the News Letter relevant to all unionists.
Previously, Northern Irish saw the paper as tied to the leadership of the divided Ulster Unionist Party. The Ulster Party is also seen as antagonistic to Ian Paisley’s increasingly popular Democratic Unionist Party.
“We are pro-unionist, pro-British, pro-law-and-order and pro-the rural community,” Hunter explains. “When I took over, we were seen as a pro-David Trimble paper, which rules out half his party and all of the Democratic Unionists.”
The paper seeks to appeal to all shades of unionism and to be the forum for the debate within unionism. Its recent major exclusive news story was the apparent endorsement of DUP candidates by senior Ulster Unionists. This strategy is credited with stabilizing a previously falling readership. The News Letter doesn’t appeal to Catholics, but it doesn’t try to. The exception is its twice weekly agricultural supplement, bought by Catholic farmers.
The equally well-establish Catholic/nationalist Irish News is in a stronger position than the Protestant/unionist News Letter, with sales of more than 50,000 copies. The Irish News is privately owned by the Fitzpatrick family and very profitable. The Irish News is actually gaining sales over a sustained period, with the paper proudly pointing out that it has lost circulation only twice in the last 11 years, no doubt aided by Catholics, who make up an increasing proportion of Northern Ireland’s population.
Gary McDonald, business editor of the Irish News, is closely involved in its recent relaunch from Berliner format to tabloid. “This is going very well, remarkably well,” he says. McDonald argues that while the other established papers — the News Letter and Belfast Telegraph — have been forced into relaunches, the Irish News chose to do so to improve its market position. “Most relaunches have been done from a position of declining sales,” he says. “Ours has been carried out over a period of 18 months from a position of growing sales. We see ourselves as having been the most strategically thought-out relaunch.” After the relaunch, daily sales increased by 1,200 copies, despite the launch of the Daily Ireland directly against it.
Daily Ireland hit the streets in February as a sister paper to the Andersonstown News, the successful bi-weekly Belfast local. Managing Director Mairtin O’Muilleoir is a former Sinn Fein counselor, and the paper is strongly republican. The Irish News is closer to the center-left Social Democratic and Labour Party. Industry observers believe the Daily Ireland sells as many copies (4,000 to 5,000) in the border areas of the Irish Republic as in Northern Ireland itself. Many families intimately caught up in the troubles fled to these border areas. O’Muilleoir says the paper’s break-even point is low because advertising is sold to the basket of its group titles, with the Daily Ireland providing an extra opportunity for advertisers.
Many of Daily Ireland’s best stories appear to have come straight from its Sinn Fein links. “There have been three major news stories this year, and we have broken all of them,” says O’Muilleoir, with only a slight exaggeration. The three breakthroughs were an interview with a man rumored to be at the heart of the investigation into the murder of Raymond McCartney, an advance notice of Gerry Adams’ call for the IRA to disband, and a story on a Presbyterian minister who did tasteless impersonations of the pope from his pulpit.
Although O’Muilleoir boasts this shows the quality of his paper’s journalism, Irish Justice Minister Michael McDowell of the strongly anti-Sinn Fein Progressive Democrats claims it illustrates it is the party newspaper of the republicans, in the way Volkischer Beobachter was to the Nazis.
The press is deeply divided, but there are small signs of breaking down this traditional separation. McDonald from the Irish News says that its sales to Protestants have increased significantly in recent years to 19 percent at present.
Colm Murphy, course director of graduate journalism at the University of Ulster, says the launch of Daily Ireland has hindered moves to bring an end to the province’s journalistic sectarianism. He says, as in Britain, the mass market lies in tabloids, which mix their politics with entertainment coverage. Although the Irish News would, for commercial reasons, like to move in that direction in the medium term, it cannot be seen to turn its back on its overwhelmingly nationalist readership when the Daily Ireland has just been launched.
The Irish News might be showing encouraging signs of moving toward an interest in the whole of Northern Ireland society, but this is less obvious with the News Letter. Murphy says that though many of his Protestant students are willing to be placed at the Irish News, the News Letter continues to be seen as a no-go area to his Catholic students.
Any sectarian analysis of Northern Ireland newspapers should be placed in context. The two leading papers in terms of sales are the Sun and the Daily Mirror, both essentially English. Both run more stories on entertainment than the Northern Irish political scene.
This analysis provided the rationale for the launch of the Daily View, a sister paper to the News Letter. They are part of Local Press Ltd., owned by venture capitalists. The company aims to improve the group’s performance and then sell out. Although the News Letter openly admits that it services a unionist and rural audience and sells few papers in urban Belfast, the Daily View aims to provide a completely opposite pattern. It launched in April, is only distributed in Belfast, has a high entertainment content, less politics and attempts to sell to both Protestants and Catholics — except it doesn’t succeed.
Analysts suggest sales may actually be as few as 400 copies a day. The Daily View’s area of distribution is so small it is not even available at Belfast International Airport. The Daily View offers little content to appeal to either political or nonpolitical readers.
If there is to be a Northern Ireland newspaper that is not sectarian, the best chance probably lies with the Belfast Telegraph. It is not overtly pro-unionist, though it lies slightly in that direction. For example, it usually uses the unionist expression “Londonderry” in favor of the nationalist term “Derry,” but it still sells well in Catholic areas of the province. The paper is part of the Dublin-based Independent News & Media group.
The Belfast Telegraph’s evening edition is well-established, but its sales have declined from 112,000 copies four years ago to around 94,000 when it launched its morning edition in March. The morning paper is published in compact format compared to its broadsheet evening format. Much of the content in the Belfast Telegraph is taken either from the UK Independent or Irish Independent papers. The British content has increased with the launch of the morning edition apparently because of the extent of free copy supplied by the UK Independent.
Despite this, the morning edition is not thriving. Industry figures say readers are resisting the tabloid format and the idea of buying a paper in the morning that is usually bought in the afternoon. There may also be unhappiness about the change of style due to more British stories. It suffers from delayed morning distribution because the company’s print house is committed to outside print contracts during the night.
The Belfast Telegraph launched its morning edition to protect its circulation and to maintain advertising revenue. People assume the Telegraph highly profitable. It’s “a cash cow,” says Ulster University’s Murphy.
It is unlikely the Daily View will be the long-term, nonsectarian paper the province seeks given its owners’ unwillingness to tolerate long-term financial loss from any of their titles. Analysts say the Daily View will likely soon be rolled into the News Letter. The News Letter’s editor, Hunter, did nothing to dismiss the thought. He thinks there will only be three surviving Northern Ireland titles in the medium to long term — the Belfast Telegraph, the Irish News and the News Letter.