Blurred Keys

The Sunday World has relaunched their website, sundayworld.com, recently.

The content includes columns, gossip, and reviews. They also have online-only content from gossip site PerezHilton.com. And there’s video from Balcony TV, along with other video clips of games and films, and ‘funnies’.

But no news.

The roll over banner advert currently running across the site shows Paul Williams, the newspaper’s crime editor, saying - as ever - he’ll be watching the criminals. That’s entertaining at least.

Below is a link to a survey on crime coverage in Irish
newspapers that I compiled for other reasons but might as well publish here. A sample week was taken in which all crime articles were recorded in
the national daily morning newspapers.

Here’s some of the main or interesting points…

• The Irish Daily Star and the Irish Examiner had the most
  crime articles with 127 and 114 stories respectively in total for the week.
• The Examiner also had the highest recorded amount of crime
  articles in any one newspaper on any one day, at 31 stories for Wednesday. The
  next two highest are 27 and 26 for the Wednesday and Thursday editions of the Irish Daily Star.
• The Irish Independent and the Irish Daily Mail had the
  least amount of crime articles with 47 and 38 respectively.
• Out of the eight
  daily papers and nine Sunday papers, there were a total of 57 covers. Just 18
  of these covers had no crime coverage on them; the vast majority – 68 percent –
  had crime on the cover page.
• Across daily
  titles, Monday has the lowest amount of crime stories. The low amount of crime
  reporting on this day can largely be linked with the covering of Court proceedings. As there are no normal Court proceedings on Sundays, there are no
  such stories available for the newspapers on Mondays.
• Of the 22
  percent of the articles that related crimes in other countries, of that only
  four percent related to those with a substantial link to Ireland.
• The Irish Mirror had the highest weekly
  percentage of international stories at 38 percent. It also had the highest
  single day percentage, accounting for 59 percent, with 7 Irish and 10
  international stories.
• The Irish Times
  had the lowest amount of international crime articles at under 15 percent,
  while the other newspapers had around 20 percent
• With a sample breakdown of the types of crimes covered there
  was a large difference between newspapers. With murder, the Irish Examiner published the largest
  amount (25) of related articles, while the Irish
  Independent had less then half that amount (11). With rape, the Irish Daily Star published 11 stories, more
  than any other paper for the week, while at the other end of the scale the Irish Daily Mail had only one rape
  story.

The report, ‘Newspaper crime coverage in Ireland’, is here (PDF). Skip to part two for the survey. The content of part one has mostly been mentioned on this site before.   

Former Taoiseach, Garret FitzGerald, as part of one of his weekly Irish Times columns (’Interaction between print and electronic media seems limited‘) wrote about the courage of journalists covering paramilitary activities in Ireland not being backed at editorial level:

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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 people must have something good to read on a Sunday" - The Clash’s ‘the Leader’

Adam Maguire thinks the Sunday Tribune is in trouble
after loosing Paul Howard and his Ross O’Carroll Kelly column, he also says
the IN&M’s original reasons for propping up the newspaper are now
invalid.

We disagree, even if the Indo own a share in around half of the
Sunday newspaper market, the paper is still serving the Indo group as a
blocker, even if a smaller one.

As well as owning 29.9 percent of the Sunday Tribune, and apparently controlling it due to out standing loans, the Independent News & Media group own Sunday papers the Sunday Independent, and the Sunday World, and a 50 percent share of the Irish Daily Star Sunday.

And while Ross O’Carroll Kelly is infamous, we’re not quite sure how
much of a loss in sale - if any real amount at all - will occur as a
result of the ending the column.

Unlike another Sunday paper - namely the Sunday Independent (the Sindo) - the Tribune is still a newspaper, not a viewspaper - we’ve just made that word up and that’s what we’re calling it from now on.

We also think that the Tribune is filling what otherwise would be a gap in the market - people who think they are above tabloids and the Sindo but put off by the ‘b’ world in the Sunday Business Post, and  maybe put off by the lack of Irish news in the Irish edition of the (London) Times.

ADDED: Adam on the other hand thinks that the Tribune is not taking advantage of a current gap of for a quality, news-led  paper. 

Quite weaker, but furthermore nevertheless, because of the gap it is filling and the habit of many of reading more then one newspaper on a Sunday,  it is somewhat likely that there is a substantial crossover of people who read the Tribune and a none Indo newspaper.

Our digital camera has been filling up with images in the last few months, many of them sights relating to the media in Dublin - so why not share them…

We didn’t go out intending to compile the images into a post, so the reason there’s not a TV3 crew but there is a picture of an RTE News presenter and camera man is because the random opportunity of snapping the latter just happened.

Of course there’s obvious shots we don’t have like the many newspaper sellers on O’Connell Street, sellers of the Evening Herald at on busy roads, fresh stacks of freesheets just thrown on the luggage holders of double-deckers, the Today FM offices Blurred Keys has past countless time and so on. Maybe next time?…

Please post comments, suggestions, abuse, and even complements below (you don’t even have to enter a name or email address)…

The former offices of Independent News & Media on Abbey St.

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Apparently when crime correspondent Paul Williams is put on the front page of the Sunday World the newspaper’s sales jump up, so the Sunday World put him on the side of Dublin Bus double-deckers. “Who keeps an eye on the on the bad guys?” reads the advertisement featuring the paper’s logo with Williams’ face and title.

Vincent Browne has a different take on Williams, Browne has previously said "crime journalism is (in the main) a debased form of the trade because it relies almost entirely on two unreliable sources: police and criminals”.