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October-November 2024 67
Obituary for ‘Obituary’
Economics of freelance journalism risk a blow to our democracy
By Gerard Cunningham
F
ilming is well under way in the
Donegal town of Ballyshannon for
Season 2 of ‘Obituary’, an Irish
black comedy television series
available on RTÉ at home and on
Hulu in the USA.
As a freelance journalist watching the new
programming announcements last year, I
was looking forward to watching ’Obituary’,
since the main character is freelance
journalist Elvira Clancy, played by Siobhán
Cullen and I was curious to see how modern
freelancing was portrayed on the small
screen.
The first season told the story of the
struggling writer who compiled the obituary
column for a local newspaper, the Kilraven
Chronicle. In the first episode, she loses this
salaried job and has to adapt to freelancing.
Unable to make ends meet, and after her
editor jokes that she should “start killing
people” when she complains about being
paid just €200 per item, she decides to
indeed supplement her income.
Unfortunately I was unable to suspend
disbelief, not at this outrageous premise, but
at the idea that a freelance writer would
receive as much as €200 for an obituary
column. In real life a freelancer gets paid a
fraction of that for an obituary, even when
the deceased is a nationally known figure. A
journalist would have to moonlight as a mass
murderer to pay the average mortgage.
There is a serious point here. Beneath the
quirky darkness, the series does
demonstrate the effects of the continuing
hollowing out of local and national
newsrooms. In the US, some regions are now
known as ‘news deserts’, because of the lack
of reliable local reporting.
There have been some pieces of good
news, such as the promised local democracy
and local court reporting grants proposed by
Coimisiún na Meán, but it is not yet clear how
much of that funding will make its way to the
pockets of journalists, and how much will
end up in higher dividend payouts to
shareholders. Ironically An Coimisiún itself
part-funded ‘Obituary’ (along with RTÉ,
Screen Ireland and the WRAP Fund, which
aims to support screen production in the
west of Ireland).
Recent UK figures give an idea of the extent
of the crisis in local journalism. An ABC audit
of regional daily newspapers showed print
circulation down 17% year-on-year in the
first half of 2024. A year earlier in 2023, the
equivalent figure was a fall of 21%. And the
year before that, print circulation fell by 16%.
Gains in digital circulation can make up for
some of those losses, and in some cases,
overall circulation can remain stable or even
increase. But the harsh truth is, digital sales
are often less valuable than print, both in
terms of how much readers will pay, and in
the value of advertising they attract.
News media find themselves caught in a
vicious circle. Even if they can hold or
increase digital readership, paper sales are
valuable, bringing in lucrative display
adverts. But readers — mostly younger — are
leaving, or never got the paper-buying habit
in the first place. Desperate to hold on to any
remaining readership, newspapers editors
double down on conservatism for that
audience, and in the process repel younger
readers.
But what if there was an antidote to the
death spiral newspapers find themselves in,
chasing ever declining older markets?
Four years ago the Norwegian
Broadcasting Corporation, NRK, set out to
restructure its climate-change reporting,
investing in deeper, more detailed reporting.
The gamble paid off, and climate-change
coverage from the broadcaster now
consistently outperforms the rest of the
newsroom’s reporting. One story, about the
impact of climate change on oceans, was
viewed nearly a million times — in a country
of about 5.5 million people. Conventional
wisdom is that audiences are not interested
in abstract topics like climate change, but
the NRK experience suggests this is a myth.
“The fact is, that if you make a good
climate story, people will want to read it”,
said Hans Cosson-Eide, editor-in-chief of
Climate and Technology News when
interviewed by the US-based Nieman
Journalism Lab.
Many potential news audiences appear to
be in the same position as voters in the
upcoming American elections; tired of the
same old debate they heard before between
ageing ‘boomers’, but ready to be enthused
by fresher reporting that speaks to younger
audiences (and ‘younger’, in this case,
means anyone under 60!).
Newspapers could do worse than study
the Harris-Walz campaign, and ask what
topics they could take a fresh approach to in
order to spark the same enthusiasm.
Otherwise, the obituaries they are writing
will be for their own industry.
I was unable to suspend disbelief in RTÉ’s ‘Obituary’’s
premise that a freelance writer would receive as much
as €200 for an obituary column. A freelancer gets a
fraction of that
MEDIA
VillageOctNov24.indb 67 03/10/2024 14:27
