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Mediahuis Ireland prepares for the digital storm

Staff of Irish Independent publisher ‘unhappy’ and ‘shocked’, admits chief executive Peter Vandermeersch

Peter Vandermeersch, chief executive of Mediahuis Ireland, said the company was preparing for a future without printed newspapers from Monday to Friday. Photograph: Steve Humphreys

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Cantillon
Thu Jan 25 2024 - 06:00

There’s a storm coming, according to Mediahuis Ireland chief executive Peter Vandermeersch, meaning it’s time to repair the roof – again. Just 10 months after the Irish Independent publisher announced its last voluntary redundancy scheme, it informed staff this week that another round of cuts was necessary.

The company – which also publishes the Sunday Independent, the Sunday World and Belfast Telegraph, as well as several regional titles – wants to cut its headcount of 549 by about 50 people, or about 25 redundancies from its 338 editorial staff and 25 from the 211 who work in other areas.

If not enough people “put their hands up”, Vandermeersch told RTÉ Radio 1′s Morning Ireland, then Mediahuis will have to consider compulsory lay-offs.

Vandermeersch framed the redundancies as a “whole-change programme”, but he wasn’t denying the impact of the cuts on staff, who, he admitted, were “unhappy” and “shocked” by the company’s announcement. If its plan amounts to fixing the roof while the sun is still shining, as he indicated, then that sunlight is already wan.

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The diagnosis of the fundamental problem remains unchanged. The news industry is shifting from print to digital, but because readers are not prepared to pay as much for a digital product as they are for a printed one – and digital advertising revenues are also relatively modest – media companies will be obliged to shrink their workforces if they want to keep their roofs intact.

[ Declining print sales to ‘outweigh’ digital growth for print-media publishers, says PwC ]

Across the European media group, a programme known as “Digital-only 2030″ is under way in the expectation that daily printed newspapers will soon disappear from Monday to Friday, although Vandermeersch again clarified that the exact date cannot be predicted. It could be 2029 or 2033. Either way, its roof will need further repairs. And, in the future, if it does leak, there will be fewer newspapers around to mop up the mess.

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