What We Mean When We Say We Are “Independent”

We call Dublin Inquirer “independent”, and readers sometimes ask what that means. Here’s our answer, in three parts.

1. Organisationally Independent

We’re not part of a larger company or chain of publications. We don’t have a corporate parent, and we don’t have shareholders pressuring us for profits.

We’re just a little start-up based in Dublin, launched in June 2015 by Lois Kapila. She’s the majority owner.

2. Editorially Independent

We write and publish the articles you see on the site because we think they’re interesting and/or important and we hope that you will too.

We’re not linked to a political party. We do not run advertisements that resemble articles, like many other media organizations do.

We also do not choose what to cover primarily in an attempt to maximize the number of clicks we get on our site (for reasons I’ll explain in the next section).

3. Financially Independent

A publication’s financial model profoundly shapes the way it covers the news.

It costs money to run Dublin Inquirer, most of which goes to paying our staff and contributors (as well as rent, taxes, and the like). And where we get that money matters.

By far the largest part comes from subscribers to our weekly online edition and our monthly print edition. We do not sell ads.

This means we don’t have to worry too much about how many clicks an article gets, if we believe it’s a good one. It also means our first loyalty is to our subscribers. Not to advertisers, or to a corporate parent, or to shareholders, or to anyone else.

That’s what we mean by independent.