Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees
Wednesday, 25 January 2023
Joint Committee on Tourism, Culture, Arts, Sport And Media
Future of Print Media and Journalism: Free Media Ireland
Mr. Jarlath Feeney:
There is no future in a race to the bottom because that is not going to work because of the diminishing returns. Covid has been an aberration, but we were generating quite a stable revenue from advertising. We have almost recovered to very close to where we were pre-pandemic, in 2019. Mr. Ryan and Mr. Timmins can answer for themselves but that is generally what we are seeing. There is an appetite for print advertising. Nobody can argue against the fact that the press has a reduced market share, but there is a market. We are primarily running businesses, so our job is to run the business with the market share available to us. We also know that we must have the content as well. The Senator made a valid point in that regard. I would have somebody to pick up content that people are interested in. We have tens of thousands being picked up every week because people want to read them. It is a fair assumption that people pick it up to read it. We do street surveys of readers and the commentary we get back is that they like the content and it means something to them. We are more about telling the stories of the communities that we are based in; what is happening in local authorities; human interest stories; what is happening in various communities and how we keep all these communities connected. We give access to businesses to get the attention of readers.
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