Blurred Keys

Five Dublin newspapers have settled libel cases against them taken by Julia Kushnir, a Ukrainian interpreter who survived the car crash in which former TD Liam Lawlor died.

Kushnir’s solicitor, Brian Lynch, told RTE Radio that the delay of over
two years was due to "Huge resistances by the papers generally fighting
this case". He added that "She is very happy with the outcome, and she
is very releaved that it is all over now".

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The Irish Times (IT) is often compared to the Guardian in at least the make-up of the two newspaper companies, it centres around the fact the two are owned by trusts. But the comparisons is, at best, questionable. 

As former IT editor Conor Brady points out in his book Up With the Times, the setting up of the two trusts were remarkably different — without going into detail here, the Guardian’s Scott Trust was set up in an act of selflessness while the Irish Times Trust was marred in controversy and pocket lining.

The current day differences of how the two companies are operated might be similar in ways, but in others the two are vastly different.

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In what started with a mulley.net post against a blogger code of conduct, the Guardian’s Organ Grinder blog has misrepresented what a prominent Irish blogger has said.

While writing about ‘content labels’ for blogs, Organ Grinder stated, “A few bloggers have already rather predictably rejected the idea already before it has even begun. Sunday Tribune columnist Damien Mulley said, "fuck off" to content labels for blogs”.

Damien Mulley, however, did not say “fuck off” to content labels, he clearly said “Blogger code of conduct? Two words - Fuck off”, and that was just the headline.

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The Guardian’s parent company is set to make around £675m from the sale of a minority share of Trader Media Group.

The firm publish Auto Trader, which is the largest selling motoring magazine and the second largest selling weekly magazine in Ireland.

The Guardian Media Group are currently sole owners of ATM and have agreed to sell a 49.9% stake to private equity investment group Apax Partners. Media Guardian is reporting the deal values the company at £1.35bn.

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A more up-to-date list is now here.

Since the original post was published the number of links we have to Irish
journalists’ blogs has massively expanded – mostly thanks to reader’s
comments on the last post.

Again, this is by no means a complete list. You can post additions,
corrections, comments, and, as always, abuse below. (You can comment
here without entering an email address, or name).

Adam Maguire, freelancer
Adrian Weckler, tech journalist / editor, S. Business Post
Dave Forsythe, Deputy Editor, Cork Independent
Declan Cashin, subeditor the Star; col. Irish Independent
Fergus Cassidy, freelancer
Gavin Sheridan, freelance sub-editor, Irish Examiner
Harry McGee, political editor, Irish Examiner
Haydn Shaughnessy tech journalist, the Irish Times
John Maguire, film critic, Irish Independent
John Reynolds, freelancer
John Naughton, (UK-based) columnist, the Observer
John Collins, tech journalist, the Irish Times
Karlin Lillington, tech journalist, the Irish Times
Kevin Rafter, assistant editor/political editor, Sunday Tribune
Kathy Foley freelancer, & columnist, the Sunday Times
Máirtín Ó Muilleoir, Andersonstown News Group
Ronan Fitzgerald, freelance journalist (the Guardian, Pitchfork)
Ruairi Roddy, technology officer, Thomas Crosbie Holdings
Ronan Price, Editor, Herald AM; tech col., Evening Herald 
Richard Delevan, business editor and col., Sunday Tribune
Sinead Gleeson, arts journalist, the Irish Times
Sarah Carey columnist the Sunday Times
Tom Griffin, (UK-based)
Una Mullally, journalist, Sunday Tribune

The Irish Times is reporting today that Julia Kushnir is settling her case with the Observer newspaper, and that such will be announced in the High Court in Dublin on Monday.

She has also taken libel action against the Sunday Independent, the Irish Independent, the Sunday Tribune, the Sunday World and the Irish Sunday Mirror.

The full article can be read on eircom.net for free and without login or at Ireland.com where paid subscription applies.

The Guardian’s Organ Grinder blog writes from the WAN: World Digital Publishing Conference & Expo on how "the Irish Times reveals the secret of how to get readers to pay for online content"..

Una O’Hare, the general manager of its website Ireland.com, has prompted many questions and much debate at the World Digital Publishers Conference.

Well into the coffee break a group of half a dozen people were still huddled around Ms O’Hare, attempting to divine her secrets.

Only a handful of newspaper sites dare charge their readers…

They are - of course - talking of commercial success, with page impressions hitting 15m this year, down from 25m pre paid subscription.

How viably the subscription model is in the long run is at least questionable. But as potential readers get more used to online payments and as digital transactions become comparable to how handing out cash is now, maybe the system will be the prevalent one.

However, in the medium term, the Times with a paid firewall, along with their main rival the Irish Independent with a free registration firewall, risk an online competitors taking market share.

Readers can access the main news stories of both papers daily from the portal of Ireland’s largest ISP, eircom.net. But, with sites such as RTE.ie/news and breakingnews.ie without barriers, the main papers are both using old models on a bold new open web.

Hidden behind a paid or free registration firewall, a badly archived website, or a site poorly indexed by Google (or your own search like the Organ Grinder blog - see here), could mean losing many potential readers and many more once off viewers.

The internet has for a long time been referred as ‘the web’, with hyperlinking now more prevalent then ever before traffic is now commonly driven from one site to another. Unlike conventional thinking, linking is now known to boost site traffic. It’s a web  and the traffic bounces back (excuse me).

YouTube and similar sites gain a substantial amount of hits from other websites such as blogs directed to particular pages of interest. The Guardian has seen the same kind of success with Guardian Unlimited, attracting a massive overseas readership. Newspapers hiding behind closed doors will not take advantage of this potential.   

After we posted the bit about the Irish media and websites, we came across Adam Maguire’s blog post in the same vain, talk of the Irish media’s lacking websites isn’t surprising with a lot of chatter coming from the UK at the moment…

Guardian Unlimited have picked up a US editor, the same outlet is to file more stories on the web first, the Telegraph also ties the old and new closer, that newspaper says they make money online, and in the US news comes that newspaper website visitors ‘are more likely to make online purchases’,

On the podcast front, Guardian Unlimited, the Telegraph, Times Online, and even the Sun offers podcasts.

The news that BBC news editors’ blogs have gone public is been used by Damien Mulley to ask when will it happen in Ireland with newspapers, and who will be first. (Also, which newspaper will be the first to podcast?)

A comment from ‘Fergal’ states, “It certainly won’t be the times. Madam doesn’t really get the whole internets thing”. We were thinking it wouldn’t be the Irish Times, rather for their conservativeness and lack of any real transparency at the moment.

However, in all fairness, the IT has the best website out of all the Irish newspapers; it’s just a pity about the subscription model they use. The IT must know it’s a barrier, otherwise why do they have so many ‘free access’ pages – including ‘the Ticket’ weekly?

Comparing the IT’s site with the largest and most visited UK newspaper site, that is Guardian Unlimited, and you’ll find some other strange things. The Guardian and most UK papers use their sites as a promotion or extension of their brands, the IT hides under the Ireland.com banner while distancing it self from its classified listings with nicemove.ie.

The only apparent forum for IT readers to express their views (besides email) looks to be the business poll, the results of which appear in the paper once a week. It’s the same with the other Irish papers. Blurred Keys remembers Thomas Crosbie Media having forums hidden away, we can’t find them now.

Going back to the subject at hand and it is hard to figure out which newspaper in Ireland will blog first. Irish tech journalists are already apparently independently bloging with links mention at the end of printed articles and columns, however, that’s about the extent of it so far. It couldn’t help things that Ireland’s broadband penetration isn’t huge, and uptake is still relatively slow and sometimes hindered. Therefore, a medium to long-term view must be taken.

However unlikely, the Guardian online success as the UK most popular newspaper website shows that it is possible for a circulation underdog to succeed online. For this to happen the site must be more then an archive like most Irish newspaper sites currently are – blogs should be a large part to this.

If that success was possible to reproduce, the Irish Examiner could excel here and at the same time show a wider audience it’s no longer the Cork Examiner, the separation of breakingnews.ie may be somewhat misguided and a missed opportunity to properly build the Examiner as the national brand for the TCH group. The Indo group makes some of the same mistakes, building one large archive site for all newspaper maybe cheaper, but it doesn’t allow for much room to expand web content such as blogs and podcasts.

Ending on a positive note, Emily Bell, editor-in-chief of Guardian Unlimited wrote early this year that the site “will break even for the first time this financial year, largely on pursuing a model of advertising revenue - something that only as recently as three years ago many industry pundits thought would be impossible”. 

We may have avoided answering the question.

According to the Irish Times, Kushnir – the sole survivor of the car crash in which the infamous Irish politician Liam Lawlor died – is suing the Observer, the Sunday Independent, the Sunday Tribune, the Sunday World, the Irish Sunday Mirror, and the Irish Independent, over wrongfully reporting that she was a teenage prostitute.

Ms Kushnir is proceeding with her case notwithstanding the fact that all the newspapers cited have either apologised or offered to do so for their coverage…

The Sunday Independent, using information provided by the Observer’s correspondent in Moscow, wrongly suggested that Mr Lawlor was in the company of a teenage prostitute when he died. The story was "lifted" by other newspapers.

The Sunday Tribune was said to have only added the claim in the late print edition.

The teenage prostitute claim was vie an Observer reporter in Moscow apparently from a police source. The Guardian Media Group’s Sunday newspaper, the Observer, held tight, reacting slower then other newspapers leaving their online edition unchanged until sometime on Tuesday of that week.

By Wednesday the Observer had issued a correction and apology –

Serious discrepancies have emerged in the account provided by police in Moscow to The Observer of the events surrounding the death of Liam Lawlor last Saturday. In the light of these discrepancies we have removed the story published in the Irish edition of The Observer from our website. We would like to apologise for the inaccuracies in the story and for the distress the story caused

On Monday, while not as direct as the Observer article, the Guardian published a story stating that -

Lawlor, 60, was killed instantly when the Mercedes he was travelling in crashed into a bollard in a red-light district. The driver was also killed and a 19-year-old Ukrainian woman travelling with Lawlor was seriously injured. Police said she had no papers. A spokesman for Moscow police said it appeared the girl had not known Lawlor long"

The Irish media had reported she was 32-years-old by this time. The story is now apprently offline.  

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