Over 50 of Ireland's regional newspapers will be online by early next year, in a joint project between the Regional Newspaper Association of Ireland (RNAI) and corporate Internet service company, Internet Ireland. This will give a world-wide reach to events as local as Ballybofey under-12s football or traffic cases from Termonfeckin and offer a link home to hundreds of thousands of emigrants. The 51 members of the RNAI may well be joined by other non-member regional titles, all of which will go online under the auspices of the Regional Media Bureau of Ireland (RMBI), as the joint project by Internet Ireland and the regional newspapers association is called. The idea is to provide a central resource for people looking for local papers, and to provide economies of scale, combined marketing and payment services for the member papers.
The catch for Ireland's diaspora, the target market, is that access will cost money. The annual subscription for a title will be £50, with six-month and quarterly rates also available. A pilot site is currently in operation, with nine titles on offer free of charge and others being added all the time. "In May we began writing the software and interfaces, but the project had been discussed before that," said Barry Breslin, director of Internet Ireland. "It has been over seven months and we will have invested almost £1 million by the time the service is fully operational in the first three months of next year. The RNAI titles currently print 600,000 copies every week and are read by a combined figure of two million people. We would be happy with five per cent of that."
The project has received funding from Enterprise Ireland and will, it is hoped, create up to 20 new jobs within the next three years. The concept of a regional newspaper going online is not entirely new. It is to be expected that a newspaper based in Ennis, Ireland's Information Age town, would now have an Internet edition. But the Clare Champion's Internet presence goes back to long before the town received that award. It was the first Irish regional newspaper with a web site back in 1994, long before any national newspaper except this one. "The primary reason [an online edition was established] was to reach expatriate Clare people - to allow them to keep in touch with home events," explains webmaster John Galvin. "It also allowed us to greatly increase our profile in that market and to have an easy point of contact for overseas advertisers. We have also found that many people subscribe to the newspaper after reading the Internet version.
"We are regularly offered stories on spec. Advertising (especially classified) is well suited for Internet communications." Galvin believes that a profit can be made from regional news. "It's harder to sell national news as there are multiple sources. There may be only one source for some local news. I think emigrants are far more interested in local news even many years after leaving home." The seven People Newspapers titles went online last June. Managing director, Michael Roche, says that the primary reason for setting up the Web edition of the papers, which cater for the southeast, was to gauge what interest there was in online editions. "It certainly sparked interest from Wexford, Wicklow and Carlow people overseas," he says. "While the jury is still out on the tangible benefit of the online editions, I am acutely aware that, other than buying the newspaper, the information we provide cannot be sourced elsewhere.
The visitor rate of 800 a week does not, he says, make carrying advertisements feasible. At present, only a selection of news and sport is being carried in the online editions, though the idea of a full online edition available on a subscription basis would also be considered. "I think it has potential to be highly profitable for regional newspapers provided we can sell an annual online subscription," says Roche. Both the Clare Champion and People Newspapers have been contacted about the RMBI project. In one way, it might be a pity to see the wide range of regional sites already operating lose their individuality while being placed out of the reach of many Internet users, but if the project makes an online presence financially viable for all regionals, then few can really complain. It is, of course, ironic that a global medium is making the vibrancy and colour of intensely local Irish news and views accessible world-wide. Never before have local media outlets been in such a strong position. Jackie Healy Rae should be pleased.