We’re always asking you all to subscribe, and many of you do, so here’s a look at the latest on where the money goes – and other details of how we run the paper.
Since we’re always asking our readers for money, I feel like you should have a view into our financial affairs: where our money comes from, and where it goes.
We recently put together detailed figures on all of that for the first half of this year, and here’s what they show.
Dublin Inquirer had about €123,500 worth of income from January and June 2025.
Of that, 64 percent was from individual subscriptions, and 30 percent was from grants.
That grant income is mostly from the Coimisiún na Meán for two things: salaries for two reporters we hired in April under the new Local Democracy Reporting Scheme, and funding for a crime victimisation survey via another scheme.
The rest of the grant income is a bit from the EU for the cross-border youth journalism project, YoCoJoin, that we’ve been part of for nearly two years now, which has been wrapping up.
We also had smaller bits from VAT refunds (2 percent), advertising (2 percent), sales via stockists and bulk/corporate subscriptions (1.5 percent), merchandise sales (0.4 percent), and events (0.3 percent).
During the same period, we spent €136,000.
Of that, about 61 percent of our spending was on salaries. There are five of us working full-time at the paper, plus two part-time.
A sizable chunk of our spending during this period – about 8.5 percent – went to pay for the crime victimisation survey, which we are working on and plan to publish the results of later this year. It’s something we’ve long wanted to do and finally got a grant for.
Another biggish bit went to cover the production and distribution of our print edition to subscribers. So, 6.8 percent of our spending for the period was on printing, envelopes, address labels, and another 5.5 percent was on postage.
I know print is dead, but I like it, and a lot of other people seem to appreciate the chance to read offline as well. We had 1,933 subscribers as of Monday. A little over 40 percent of them get the print edition.
We’ve priced our subscriptions – €6/month for Digital, and €9/month for Digital + Print – so that the income left over after distribution costs, for salaries and everything, is about the same either way.
We print 1,000 copies of the print edition. Our last mailout of papers to subscribers was 789 copies. We also deliver copies directly to bulk subscribers, and a few stockists.
(Our reach is bigger than this might suggest. We’ve had about 80,000 visitors to our website over the past 28 days, we have two weekly email newsletters that go out to about 10,000 people, and we share our articles on a variety of social-media channels.)
After salaries, the crime survey, and print edition distribution, the spending line items in our budget get smaller.
During the first six months of the year, 6.5 percent of our spending was on freelance fees, and 3.7 percent was on rent and office insurance.
And we spent even smaller bits on software subscriptions, bank loan repayments, accounting services, and office supplies.
Taking the average monthly income from, and spending on, each line item – and projecting that out till the end of the year, it looks like we’ll make it there alive.
On a monthly budget of about €24,000, we’re projecting a monthly deficit of about €600. And that we’ll still have a little money in the bank come New Years.
A lot of things could change, and reality could very easily turn out a bit better, or a bit worse than what those projections show. (And possibly a lot better, or worse.)
I hope it’s a bit better, as it makes me nervous that things are so close to the bone – though it’s always been that way, since we started in 2015.
We are an independent, local paper, trying to do quality, original local journalism – and provide decent jobs for journalists who want to do that.
We spend nearly everything we earn – and sometimes a bit more – on the ever-rising costs of running the paper, and that is basically fine.
We don’t have a corporate parent, or shareholders, or anyone else demanding we turn a quarterly profit and give them some.
We would ideally like to have a cushion in the bank to weather tougher times, or test projects or ideas – but we haven’t got there yet.
So that’s all good, more or less.
However, one thing that does bother me about where things are headed is that our income from subscriptions has plateaued.
We met on Friday as a team at Dublin Inquirer to review our financials.
It turned out that, actually, most people were much more interested in talking about whether we should start a podcast.
But someone did ask a question about the finances: how did our subscription income for the first half of this year compare to the same period last year?
So I got the numbers together, and they showed the plateau we already knew about pretty starkly.
In the first half of 2020, our subscription income was €52,825. In 2021, it rose to €66,365. Since then it has leveled out at roughly €80,000 for the first six months of 2022, 2023, 2024, and 2025.
That would be okay, except during that time period inflation spiked and the cost of nearly everything went up – for the company, so we needed more income to pay its bills, and for all of us who work here, so we needed pay rises to pay our bills.
For years we depended almost exclusively on income from readers’ subscriptions for income, which we thought was great.
We think our interests align really well with those of our readers. We want to do the best journalism we can, and we think that’s what you want us to do as well.
But as our subscription income levelled off and our costs kept rising, we looked for other ways to bring in more money to make ends meet.
We’ve started selling a bit of advertising, and some merchandise, and run some more events, like our summer school. We’ve also applied for – and got – some grants, which have been growing as a share of our income, and have been crucial in recent years to helping us pay our bills.
We are of course, grateful for the grants, but we are also hoping to reduce our reliance on them, and to earn a larger share of our income directly from our readers. We’ve done a lot of brainstorming about how to do that.
Our preferred method would be by selling more subscriptions. But we’ve also talked about other ideas, like, for example, raising our prices, asking readers who are not paying subscribers for a one-off “tip” if they like an article, selling more merchandise, or running more events.
We’ve also looked at launching a couple of new paid products. For example, we now publish a Things to Do newsletter each Thursday, and we’ve talked about whether to charge a small monthly subscription – maybe €3/month – for people who want to continue to get it.
The thing we are trying first though, is our basic fall-back strategy: publish even more good articles, and send them out there into the world, and hope and believe that people will subscribe to read those, and support what we do.
That is one of the two big reasons we applied for funding for two salaries for two additional reporters from the Coimisiún na Meán’s Local Democracy Reporting Scheme last year – which we were lucky enough to get.
But I have really mixed feelings about that scheme. On one hand, it helps us do more of the kind of local journalism we want to do, which is great. But there are downsides too.
The biggest chunk of our grant income at the moment comes from the government’s Coimisíun na Meán.
So it’s one part of the government paying for our reporting on other parts. Although it’s paying us to do more of what we were doing anyway, with no editorial strings attached, it still feels – and probably looks – a bit awkward.
We debated whether to apply for the grants, but we figured there’s so many more articles we wanted to be writing and if we had a couple more reporters we could do that.
And that if we did more good articles, over time, more people would subscribe, which is our preferred way of earning an income.
But also, if we didn’t get these Local Democracy Reporting Scheme grants for the Dublin area someone else would, and they’d be competing against us. As a (reasonable) condition of these grants, the articles they pay for with public money must be free to the public.
That would have meant we’d be trying to convince people to subscribe to Dublin Inquirer to get articles about things happening in the Dublin City Council and Fingal County Council areas, while some other news organisation(s) would be giving them away free to the reader, paid for by Coimisiún na Meán.
So, with those two goals in mind – add capacity to publish more articles, hoping that would help earn us more subscriptions, and head-off some state-subsidised competition – we applied for, and we got the grants.
We grew our team, and have two great new reporters. We’re now publishing more stories, and so – because Lois and I can only do so much editing in one evening – started publishing new articles not only on Wednesdays, but also on Fridays.
We’re grateful for the financial support that has allowed us to do this. But I also think that this grant programme could be undermining our business model over the longer term.
We have an intentionally “leaky” paywall on our website. You can read a few articles free each month and after that you get locked out.
Though, to be honest, we’ve chosen a paywall technology that’s easy enough to get around if you feel like it. And if you email us and ask, we’ll give you a free Digital subscription so you can read all you want without having to take the effort of dodging the paywall.
The idea is that the paywall is meant to be a nudge to those who can, to pay to subscribe, but not a barrier to those who want to read more but aren’t in a position to pay to do so.
It’s an attempt to balance a public-service mission and the natural desire of journalists to have people read our articles, against a need to make enough money to fulfil that mission.
We think the paywall works in giving the nudge we want it to. But the Coimisiún na Meán requires (for good reasons) us to nudge less.
I worry a bit that that might mean fewer subscriptions, and more dependence on grants in the long term.
So that’s a peek into the business side of running Dublin Inquirer.
It’s going well, in the sense that even after 10 years, we are still here, still publishing the kind of journalism we believe supports the community we are trying to serve.
It’s also going well in the sense that our team, and our budget, are bigger than they ever have been – which allows us to do more of this.
But we’re feeling a bit funny about the direction our income mix is headed, and so we plan to work to change that trajectory. We’re not planning drastic action.
We really like having two additional reporters. We plan to apply again for Local Democracy Reporting Scheme funding for next year, and hope we get it.
But we’d like to grow subscriptions between now and then enough to cover one of the two salaries, and only apply for grant funding for the other one – reducing our dependence on that programme by 50 percent.
It takes roughly 550 new subscriptions to cover the salary of a reporter.
And we’ll keep working on other ideas too. Let me know if you have any! sam@dublininquirer.com.
“I don’t want my story or the way my headline was written and the backlash it got to be a prime example for immigrants to not tell their stories,” says Sumyrah Khan.
We’ve a new range of merchandise, just in time for our 10th birthday.
On 28–29 June, we’re running five two-hour sessions aiming to offer skills and knowledge useful to journalists, and others trying to make the city a better place.
Come learn about navigating local government, making Freedom of Information Act requests, starting and monetising your own publication, and more.
