The Irish Times

On a beautiful day in Dublin, Ireland the Journalism class took a visit to The Irish Times newspaper. The Irish Times is known for its serious news coverage and has been around for 152 years. This paper was the first newspaper to have ever produced online starting in 1994.

When we arrived at The Irish Times we had an opportunity to sit in and listen to one of their daily news conferences. In this conference, the members discussed yesterday’s newspaper and how things were good and could have been better. They also discussed stories for tomorrow’s paper. This part of the day was most interesting to me because we got to experience the behind the scene work of the thought process that creates the paper.

Among the many topics discussed, there was one most interesting. This discussion was on Mississippi and there was not a positive thing to be mentioned. The story was based on Mississippi’s statistics of high teenage pregnancy rate, most obese state and broke. Read the full article here. It was not purposely done that this topic was discussed during our visit. I will say though, as a resident of Mississippi, these statistics where embarrassing to hear.

The rest of the day we listened to speakers who discussed their role within the paper. The foreign news editor, Paddy Smith, discussed the paper in general and some of its financial troubles. He told us that circulation is falling as well as advertising. This is especially due to the economy crash in Ireland. The fall of circulation is also falling due to the fact that people are just not reading the paper anymore and their target market is beginning to die. As well as most readers are beginning to read online. The news assistant, who spoke with us, informed us that the print issue of the company is the revenue.

The online news editor for the newspaper talked to us about the history of the online edition of the newspaper. There is and e-paper available everyday that is an exact replica of the printed editions. There is currently no subscription needed to participate with the e-paper, but there will be one soon.

Finally, we spoke with the marketing and advertising department. They told us about the importance of the advertisements for the paper. They showed us some innovated layouts and ways they have been advertising in the paper and different uses of space to help build their advertising clientele.

This was such a great experience and the class and I was happy to be able to visit The Irish Times.

For more information visit http://www.irishtimes.com/.

By Jessica Thompson