Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Wednesday, 16 December 2020

Joint Committee on Media, Tourism, Arts, Culture, Sport and the Gaeltacht

Challenges facing Public Broadcasting and the broader Media Sector as a result of Covid-19: Discussion

Mr. Vincent Crowley:

I will deal first with the last question on e-papers and the challenges of moving online. Most national news organisations now are what we would call digital first. The first instinct is to put the story up online immediately. Newspapers try to be first because if they are not first out of the blocks, somebody else will be out of the blocks and the story will be gone. There are certain exclusive stories that they may keep, for example, investigative-type stories. Maybe I should not mention this but the golfgate story, for example, went up online the evening before it was published in print. Obviously, it was a front-page story the following day. It is a digital first mentality and that is how the journalists now think. Journalists write across both the digital and print media and their mindset has changed. That has been a journey for them as well because the instinct of a journalist is to hold the story for the newspaper the following day but one cannot really do that any more. In a sense, one of the things we are looking for in the midst of all of this is a bit of breathing space to pivot from being a newspaper producer to a digital producer. All our member titles are on that journey but there is a bit of time involved in getting there. We would like a bit of support and a breathing space to help us get there.

Mr. Kavanagh or Mr. O'Reilly might like to talk about the UK model or models in other countries that might be instructive for here in relation to Google and Facebook.

Comments

No comments

Log in or join to post a public comment.