Mr. Colm O'Reilly:

Hopefully it is not a case of the worst is last. Good afternoon, Cathaoirleach, Deputies, Senators and Minister. I am the chairperson of NewsBrands Ireland and the chief operating officer of the Business Post Group. I am joined by my fellow publishers: Sammi Bourke of theIrish Farmers' Journal; Conor Goodman of the Irish Times Group; and Mark Deering, head of corporate affairs at DMG Media. I thank committee members for the kind invitation to speak on this critical issue for our industry and for the support we received in the recent VAT campaign. I cannot state enough how important it was to bring VAT for print and digital newspapers to zero in the recent budget. As we make the digital transformation journey, the €16.5 million that NewsBrands members will gain from that measure has been unbelievably important.

NewsBrands members produce multi-platform public service journalism that is not only central to a free and democratic society, but also feeds the wider news ecosystem of news. Much of the broadcast content on TV and radio originates as a story in the print or online news system. While print sales have declined over the past decade, Irish news publishers are getting a greater command of audience. According to Kantar TGI, in 2022, 82% of Irish adults will read a physical hard-form newspaper or digital newspaper every week in this country and 10.2 million hard-form newspapers will be sold every month. It is ironic at a time when Irish people are looking for more quality news and news publishers are reaching a bigger audience that our economic model is under huge strain.

The traditional revenue sources that newspapers work off, namely circulation and advertising, have been impacted by a couple of mega trends. The advancement in consumer technology has driven a change in how people consume news. People take their news on their phones nowadays and are buying fewer printed newspapers. Also, it is our advertising. The big tech platforms that started out in social media and as search engines are now the dominant players in global advertising.

As a result, our members have to innovate or they will perish. As circulation continues to decline, publishers have invested heavily. Over the past six years, Irish publishers have invested over €20 million in capital expenditure. More than €9 million has gone into digital transformation and digital platforms. Driven by changes in consumer behaviour, publishers are already distributing news content in non-traditional formats and by new distribution channels. Members will probably be familiar with things like podcasts, video clips, newsletters, infographics, data and e-marketplaces.

Our industry knows how to innovate and will stand up and be counted but our editorial independence is critical and remains key to what we do. Within this journey of transformation to digital, people are core to what we talk about. Skills and capabilities of journalists are things we spend significant amounts of money on as we upskill and train our staff to be able to produce content in a multimedia world.

In the very near future, publishers will have to start focusing on different types of formats, such as short and long video creation that could be streamed or, indeed, distributed via TV stations.

Gamification has become an incredibly important part of the digital ecosystem. The New York Times crossword is an online interactive subscription model that has more subscribers in its own right than The New York Times news site and I will not even start on the cooking. In the longer term, publishers will also need to invest in Web 3.0, the multiverse and, indeed, interactive artificial intelligence, AI, and 3D modelling.

Generating revenue from these new business models is the single biggest challenge. The ecosystem is very important and we continue to play our role but we only have to look across the water to see the impact. A recent study by the University of Cambridge found UK news content to be worth approximately £1 billion to the two main platforms, that is, Google and Meta. Despite the value news publishers' content brings to them, the platforms share little, if any, of that revenue with us. Even when they share the revenue and licence our content, the economic and commercial relationship is skewed in their favour. This inequality persists, notwithstanding the transposition of the EU copyright directive. While this legislation provides publishers with the legal right in licensing their content, it does not, unlike in other EU member states, provide a mechanism to compel the platforms to negotiate fairly. We welcome the Future of Media Commission recommendation that the EU copyright directive be assessed within 12 months of transposition. However, we note that as a result of the delay of the Future of Media Commission being implemented, it will be some time before we see this happening.

Defamation gives rise to one of the significant costs we face in our industry. My colleagues in Local Ireland already referred to the rise in the cost of newsprint and the energy crisis which is making print a very difficult economic formula right now. However, defamation is another significant problem for us. Considerable sums of money are put into protecting our newspapers against some of the most draconian defamation laws anywhere in the modern world. The cost of defamation runs to millions annually of which 60% goes on legal costs alone. Many of these cases do not even get to court. It becomes a simple case of a long, drawn-out settlement which takes up management time and benefits very few people. We welcome the long-delayed publication of the report of the review of the Defamation Act 2009 and we cannot overstate the urgency of its implementation to create more fair and balanced defamation legislation.

The challenges impeding ongoing publisher investment in future business models can be addressed effectively through policy and legislative change which, in turn, will help quality journalism thrive in the digital age.