A look at Dublin Inquirer's finances

We met the other day as a team here, and went over our finances for 2025 and the outlook for 2026, so I thought I'd share with you, as I sometimes do, what we talked about.

We ask people to subscribe to help us do what we do, so it only feels fair to tell you all where we are financially, and what we'd spend that subscription income on.

First, the big picture.

In our most recent annual accounts, filed in November with the Companies Registration Office, for the fiscal year ending 31 March 2025, we had a loss of €1,871. In the previous year, we'd made a profit of €133.

This is, essentially, breaking even in both years.

That's kind of fine. It'd be nice to be hugely profitable, but what would we do with those profits anyway? We've no parent company or shareholders demanding them.

So my goal is to spend basically all of the money we get on journalism. If it looks like there's going to be any "extra" money at the end of the year, I spend it.

The main thing you need to make journalism, is journalists. So I raise salaries, commission more freelance articles, and provide tools that journalists need to do their jobs.

Of course, I wish we had a bit more money, so I could pay our journalists more, and, importantly, have a cushion in the bank. I'm doing my best to get us there.

Income

In terms of income, our main source of revenue in 2025 was from readers, via subscriptions (and tips/small once-off donations).

I think this is great, and that it gives us the right incentives: the people who pay (most of) our bills are our readers, who we believe just want us to do good journalism – which is what we want to do anyways. Synergy!

You'll notice that grants also made up a big portion of our income. That's predominantly from Coimisiún na Meán via its Local Democracy Reporting Scheme.

We got funding in 2025 to hire two new reporters to cover Dublin City Council and Fingal County Council. And to run our City Centre Crime Victimisation Survey.

We're small, and adding two reporters to the team was a big lift. It meant our reporters were writing more articles than our editors – Lois and I – could edit on a single evening.

So, after publishing once a week (on Wednesday morning) since 2015, we moved to publishing twice a week (adding Friday morning).

That meant two nights working until 1am or 2am, and getting up at 6.30am with the kids and going to work and trying to get through the day bleary-eyed.

For us, it was also a test to see whether more articles would translate into more subscriptions, and a quicker runway away from grants and greater reader revenue, which is the grail.

That hasn't really happened. A year ago we had 1,932 subscribers. Today we have 1,925 subscribers.

So for 2026, while we applied for – and were offered – the grants to cover the same three things again (two reporters, one survey), we decided to take only enough for one reporter, and the crime survey.

That means in next year's accounts you'll see a smaller share of our income coming from grants from Coimisiún na Meán.

So that's the income side. Now let's look at spending.

Expenditure

Our main cost is employing people: salaries, payroll taxes, and since auto-enrollment for pensions came in last year, pension contributions.

In 2025, the gross salary for a full-time staff member here was €2,625 a month – we all make the same, either in full, or pro-rated, for those who work part-time. In 2026, we're raising that by 3 percent, as the cost of living is rising.

In January 2026, to pick a pretty representative month, we spent €23,221.44 to run Dublin Inquirer.

Here's what we spent that money on: 73.3 percent on salaries and associated costs, 5.7 percent on freelance fees, 5.3 percent on mailout/postage costs, 4.8 percent on printing, and smaller bits on software, rent, accounting, and other costs.

So that's a peek behind the scenes at Dublin Inquirer Limited, headquartered in a room with four desks at the Digital Hub, on Thomas Street, in Dublin 8.

Value for money

The reason this company exists is not to make profits for a parent company, or shareholders, or owners.

The reason it exists is to pay the salaries of journalists so they/we can do the kind of original, quality, independent community journalism we want to do – and that we think a healthy society, and democracy, require.

We write articles about issues we think matter, and shape the lives of people in Dublin every day. Things like housing, homelessness, vacancy, dereliction, public transport, cycling, parking, immigrant life, film, music, arts, books, and food.

Our articles let readers know what their government – local, national, and associated quangos, etcetera – is doing. Where we find problems, we try also to look around and talk to people involved, or experts, or look to other jurisdictions, to try to find solutions as well.

We also try to not only cover the challenges faced by this city, and those of us who live in it, to help readers find ways to get out and get involved – with their neighbours – in their communities. And, with our weekly Things to Do newsletter, to get out and have some fun in town, as there's much to be had.

More than 192,000 people visited our website in the past 30 days. Although, this was unusually high – more usual might be 120,000.

Our two newsletters – Dublin News, with our headlines (by me), and Things to Do, with, well, things to do (by Michael Lanigan) – go out to about 10,500 people. Let's not dwell on who has a bigger audience, because it's Michael.

Our articles are also picked up fairly regularly by other, larger media outlets, which spread them even further. And we can see them having impacts, feeding into public debates, prompting public officials to fix specific problems, helping people make connections and feel part of the community.

Making all this possible, by providing the core of our revenue, are our 1,925 subscribers (thank you!). If you'd consider joining them by subscribing, and/or urging others to subscribe, we'd be really grateful.

Since we're small, every subscription taken out, or one-off donation given, or advert bought really makes a difference.

If you have any questions, don't hesitate to get in touch, I'm easy to reach.

All the best,
Sam Tranum, Editor
sam@dublininquirer.com
0873924797