Dr. Dawn Wheatley:

I will keep it brief. I will respond to the two questions the Deputy raised and follow up on what Mr. Goodman said regarding The Irish Times. It is primarily the print titles that are implementing the paywalls and we understand the reasons for that. I echo what I said earlier about the importance of radio because it is accessible, which is what makes it distinctive in this context. I would have concerns with the print titles around paywall decisions. I see my role here today as providing the audience perspective. I totally understand the industry's logic behind these decisions. In response to something Mr. Goodman said, I would say that I have noticed - I could be wrong - an increasing number of paywall-only or subscriber-only articles appearing. The point is that many of them are the more in-depth, more analytical, or explainer-type articles that set out to clarify a complicated issue but are now for access by subscribers only. Coming from an ideological perspective on the audience side, that could lead to increasing fragmentation. As I mentioned in my opening statement, we still have lots of high-quality accessible information. As Mr. Goodman has said, much of that is still available from The Irish Timeswith the metered system but we need to be mindful of those trends.

I will make a second point on transparency. It is something I want to raise today because it is very manageable. At a time when levels of trust are falling or are at risk, we are lucky here that we have relatively high levels of trust compared with many countries, the UK in particular, but we should not wait until it dips to try to regain it. Instead, news organisations should try to be open and upfront about some of the indicators I have mentioned. It would not be laborious to have sections on websites laying out clear corrections and policies that lay out the various things I have listed. The link I included in my written submission is US based but it has examples of 20 or 30 US news organisations and you can click on each of these indicators. It will bring you, for example, to TheNew York Timespolicy on how they use anonymous sources and the fact that it has to go through a process. It is a very tangible and accessible thing, but for news producers it can be a shift towards revealing state secrets of sorts. When trust is at risk, being that open could be really helpful in the long term.