In Tallaght, a local paper battles on despite the challenges facing the industry

On 8 February, an article in the Echo reported on a performance by the Clondalkin Drama Group of Peter Panto.

“They were so full for the first Sunday show that they had to turn away a few people, so they may need to search for a larger space in the future,” it says.

The article ended with an invitation from the group “to support them in their efforts to establish a legitimate arts centre for Clondalkin, which would allow all theatre, music, and dance groups to have a dedicated performance area”.

This isn’t the first time the Clondalkin Drama Group has been featured in the Echo, a paid-for newspaper founded in 1980 that covers parts of west Dublin including Tallaght, Ballyfermot, Clondalkin and Lucan.

“We always get featured in the Echo every time we do a show and it’s always really beneficial to us,” says Michaela Courtney, a member of the drama group.

“I doubt bigger papers would bother because we’re just so small,” Courtney said Friday. “We don’t even have a theatre, just perform upstairs in pubs or in school halls, which is why the local papers and their support are so important for us.”

Just spreading the word through the group’s website and social media would be no replacement, Courtney said.

“That’s really helpful too, but it’s good to have physical advertising like in the papers to be seen by a bigger crowd, not everyone is online,” she said. “I feel like appearing in the paper helps to legitimise us in a way.”

The challenges for the news business have been multiplying and deepening for decades now. Advertisers have taken their money to tech companies like Google and Facebook, readers are dwindling, circulations are falling, and newsrooms shrinking.

Seventeen local papers in Ireland have ceased publication since 2008, Bob Hughes, executive director of Local Ireland, a group representing paid-for weekly papers, told an Oireachtas committee in 2022. “That is 17 communities that have lost their local newspapers,” he said.

In Tallaght, the family that owns the Echo is facing into these changes. The paper is smaller now than it used to be, and they’ve adjusted their expectations for its growth and profitability – but, most importantly, they are still here, says managing director Emma Kennedy.

“As a provider to the community, it’s got such elation and it gives us such highs, when people can walk up to you on the street and say, ‘Oh my god, you wrote about our community centre and thanks so much and if the Echo wasn’t here who would write our story?’” Kennedy said.

“But it’s always a very stressful business to run – as a business,” she said.

A rocky road

David Kennedy, Emma’s father, founded and ran the paper for many years – before selling it in 2005 for about €5 million to Johnston Press, as part of broader expansion into Ireland by the British newspaper chain.

At that time, during the Celtic Tiger years, the Echo had 37 staff and a circulation of about 12,000 print copies a week, Emma says, seated last Thursday across from her father at a table in the cafe at the Edge co-working space in Tallaght, where the paper has offices.

In 2010, the Kennedys bought the paper back from Johnston Press, for about €1 million.

“They didn’t care about paper, they didn’t care about Tallaght, they didn’t care about the people,” says Emma. “So therefore it was like, ‘That’s costing us. Offload it.’”

In 2018, Johnston Press, burdened by hundreds of millions of pounds of debt, went into administration. Its assets were taken over by its creditors.

The Echo, meanwhile, is still operating, although – like pretty much every print newspaper in Ireland – it has seen its circulation fall substantially. “Now we’d be down to five and six thousand,” Emma says.

Hughes, of Local Ireland, in his 2022 appearance at the Oireachtas committee, said local newspaper circulation in Ireland had since 2010 fallen by 50 percent. On the phone on Tuesday, he said that between 2022 and 2023, print sales fell another 5.5 percent.

For local papers, as for nearly everyone, Covid-19 and its lockdowns in 2020–2021 hit hard. The Echo’s most recent publicly available financial statement, for the year ended April 2022, shows a swing from profit to loss.

For the 2021 financial year, the company behind the paper reported a profit of nearly €171,000. For the 2022 financial year, it was a loss of about €138,000.

“This trading position, along with the company’s balance sheet position casts a significant doubt on the company’s ability to continue as a going concern,” the documents say.

Seated at the table in the bright cafe in the Edge, among the cheerful hustle and bustle, David says that over the years, “We had a unique accounting method. We call it the Seesaw Method. We made money, we lost money, we made money, we lost money …”

The Echo is smaller these days. “There’s 15 of us now,” Emma says. But it is still here.

Bread and butter

Hughes, of Local Ireland, says that most revenue for most local papers comes from print advertising. This is true for the Echo too, the Kennedys say.

“The biggest, you know, revenue stream, print advertising and newspapers sales are still our bread and butter,” says Emma.

Says David: “Roughly speaking, in general terms, 75 percent comes from advertising, maybe 25 percent from newspaper sales.”

However, companies are spending less money on advertising in print newspapers, and more on digital advertising – primarily on Google and Facebook, according to the 2024 media market forecast from “marketing communication” company Core.

And the Echo declines some ads it might get, on principle, Emma Kennedy says.

“We’re in, you know, an area that has its ups and downs and socio-economic difficulties and things like that,” she says. The Echo doesn’t take gambling or alcohol ads, she says. “I just don’t agree with it.”

They distribute the papers to shops and newsstands, and also have a system of door-to-door sales, says David Kennedy.

“We don’t have enough newsagents in this area,” he says. “And, you know, there’s lots of people who won’t go to the local newsagent.”

It’s a “decent revenue stream”, Emma says, “even though we only get to, you know, we don’t even get 50 percent [of the cover price] back”.

“With the kids it’s real old school, they get tips at Christmastime and if they’re astute, if they’re smart – I always remember my son did it years ago and he’d be telling everyone, ‘I make my confirmation next week’”, she says.

Upsides

With all the challenges facing local newspapers in Ireland, where are the opportunities – what is working well?

“Well, digital,” says Hughes, of the local newspaper association Local Ireland. “Digital is working for some of our members, definitely.”

In addition to print ads, the Echo sells digital ads. Although, they limit the number of ad spaces on their website.

“We don’t do columns on either side, wallpaper ads”, and they don’t let big agencies decide what ads to push into the ad space the Echo’s website does have, Emma Kennedy says.

“I don’t want to have no control over what goes up on the site,” she says. “You could be open to, you know, pushing brands to people who don’t have money and things.”

Instead, “We sell our digital advertising direct, and it’s much more valuable,” she says. They sell not only display ads, but also advertorials.

“Yeah, massive selling point that I use all the time: book two ads and get one free and a free editorial,” she says. “It’s marked advertorial.”

And they are also charging now for “commercial” social-media posts, she says.

Seeking subscriptions

As businesses have moved advertising money from print newspapers to tech platforms like Google and Facebook, many newspapers have turned to their readers for support.

“These approaches have been a rare industry bright spot over the last few years,” says the 2023 Digital News Report from Oxford University’s Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism.

Although, the share of people paying for news online has “has remained at 17% for the second year in a row – raising questions about whether we may have, for now, reached the peak of the subscription trend, at least for current subscription offers”, it says.

For Ireland, the share of respondents to the Reuters Institute’s question about paying for online news was 15%. And of those who do pay for online news, only 6 percent chose local news, the report says.

After years of thinking about it, the Echo last spring put up a “leaky” paywall and started asking people to pay to read, says Emma Kennedy. While people were paying in print, there was an online audience getting the product for free, she says.

It was a “huge undertaking”, and a big lift financially, to rejig the website for this move, she says. “We have no pockets, nevermind deep pockets, to dip into to pay for this.”

The Echo has “in and around 30,000” unique users visit its website a week, and they were worried putting up the paywall would drive some of those away, she says.

“When we introduced the paywall, I thought we were going to see a nosedive,” she says. “It didn’t drop.”

It also hasn’t brought a flood of subscribers.

“We were thinking we’d get 1,000 subscribers. Like, we’re probably up on maybe 400,” she says. But she says she hopes that’ll build over time, as the years pass.

“We get a lot of people subscribing for a month and coming back off,” she says. “Which initially we were like, “Ah”, and then we’re like, no, if they’re willing to pay five euros to read one thing that’s fine.”

Have they thought about adding a feature to their website where users could pay a one-off fee to read the article they want to read?

“I find the development of the software side of it is not as easy as people make it out to be,” she says. “Can we just take a break? This is not what I want to focus on.”

After all, the digital side of the business is not the most important part of it, she says.

“If our digital platform was to close down tomorrow, we’d still be running the business,  because it’s not the thing making money for us,” she says.

“But if you flip that and stop the print edition, yeah, and decided to just be online? We’d have to close everything,” she says. “It wouldn’t sustain paying 15 people. It might sustain two.”

The path forward

The immediate future for the Echo, then, doesn’t look all that different from its past: printing papers, selling them on newsstands and door to door, selling ads to go in them.

While also selling some digital ads and building their subscription business over time.

And all that makes it possible to keep its staff in work, and publish about 80 stories a week about their community, David Kennedy says.

“People will always want the news,” he says. Ultra-local stories tend to do well for the Echo, says Emma Kennedy,

“If we write a story about a business that’s just in Tallaght, no one else is ever going to write that story for them,” she says.

“You know, some of them might get picked up if they’re kind of bougie or if they’re, you know, trendy, or the local cafe thing, or the new bakery that’s doing some crazy TikTok videos, but most of the time, they won’t get a story written about them,” she says.

“Then if it’s in print, it’s in the historical record, and that’s there forever – and then it goes online, which they love, and they get shared around with people with family and friends,” she says.

Or there was a story about a woman who won a medal from the Pope for all her service in a local church, she says. “And the reach and the interaction, the engagement on that story was phenomenal,” she says.

The Echo’s reach has been a great help to the Clondalkin Drama Group, says Michaela Courtney.

“It’s helped us in building our reputation as an arts group in Clondalkin,” she says. “They always reach out to us which is nice and it really feels like we’re part of the community.”

Emma Kennedy says they’ve looked at making the Echo a not-for-profit, or a social enterprise.

“Ultimately, for us the most important thing is that this survives and stays in the community as a service,” she says.