Media

NewsCorp critically now has a presence in all Ireland’s major urban radio markets

Barely noticed, outside a few articles recalling its early days as pirate station Phantom, alternative music radio station TXFM announced at the end of March that it will shut down before year’s end. Unfortunately, despite a recent rebranding, TXFM was never able to attract more than 19,000 listeners according to JNLR surveys, a number which made it unsustainable as it could not attract advertising revenues. Even Denis O’Brien and Paul McGuinness cannot afford to subsidise a loss-making music station forever. The problem TXFM faced was a simple one. When its potential audience can programme Spotify or similar apps on their smartphones to cater to even the most eclectic of musical tastes, why would they listen to a radio station where the music is constantly interrupted by a stream of adverts, DJ patters, weather and station idents, and news bulletins? No matter how mission-focused a station is, those interruptions, to raise revenue and satisfy Broadcasting Authority requirements, are a necessity of business. TXFM is a straw in the wind for other radio stations. “Smart” as in “Smartphone” is almost a redundant term for millennials. A Google survey last year showed 97% own a Smartphone. As podcasting becomes more accomplished, growing out of the same garage roots romanticised in Phantom FM obituaries into swanky professional studio surroundings, it too will challenge over-the-air broadcasters. From the Irish Times to the New York Times publishers are adding audio offerings to their websites. And while most products remain studio-bound and indistinguishable from the radio broadcasts they compete with, the best are moving out of studios and exploring new formats a public-service bureaucracy like RTÉ cannot easily adjust to. Sponsorship opportunities; sponsored- content podcasts – embracing advertorials and commercial features; and new software allowing easier advertising inserts and listener measurement, all make it likely that the current generation of talking-heads podcasts will find itself quickly moving into the territory of drama, location reporting, and edited news and documentary packages. The medium even lends itself to a renaissance in fiction drama, and comedy, and access to niche audiences rarely catered to at present outside the community-radio sector. But the disruptive impact of “phones” goes beyond radio and podcast. Newspapers, having first adjusted to the death of in-depth and at-length reporting as their readers moved from print to computer screens, have spent the last decade learning to cater for attention-scarce readers. So it is we see brief news reports rarely going above 300-400 words – roughly the number of words that can fit on a computer screen without scrolling), and increasing use of listicles, quizzes and click-baiting headlines. And yet, just as news outlets have adjusted to the new paradigm, a new report from the American Press Institute (API) shows that phones are changing how readers consume news once again. Readers checking the latest headlines on their favourite news websites on a computer screen are typically doing so at work. Behaviourally, they feel they are “stealing” some time from their employers to catch the latest update, whether that’s an Indo or Irish Times column, an RTE news report or a Broadsheet joke. According to the study, readers minimise their guilt over this “stolen time” by only catching up on news in quick bursts. When it comes to phones though, that behaviour changes. The phone belongs to the reader, not to an employer and so when readers choose an article there they are much more willing to invest time in a longer story. Stories longer than 1,200 words, got 23 percent more engagement, 45 percent more social referrals and 11 percent more pageviews than shorter stories in the API study. Similar research findings may be behind the decision by the Sunday Times/Times of London to abandon “Breaking News” on its website, instead recreating an old-style emphasis on “editions”, with new stories updated three times a day, at 9AM, midday, and 5PM. It cannot be a coincidence that those times match the beginning of the workday, lunch-break, and the end of the workday: the times when people are most likely to check their phones. Of course, not everyone will get off the news carousel. The Times, already one of the more successful paywall sites, can afford not to chase every click, while advertising-only free sites will still tumble over each other to be the first with breaking-news flashes and hot takes. But, combined with an audience already willing to invest more time in individual stories, it may herald a widespread return to considered and in-depth reporting. By Gerard Cunningham

Independent investigative journalist, Gemma O’Doherty, has slammed a culture of fear in Irish newsrooms and a stifling environment, as media ownership is concentrated in fewer hands. Speaking at the the Newsocracy conference organised by MEP Nessa Childers in partnership with the Institute For Future Media and Journalism (FUJO) at Dublin City University, O’Doherty addressed the topic ‘When Journalists become Spin Doctors’. O’Doherty, who wrote for the Irish Independent for 17 years, is currently working on a series of documentaries on unsolved Irish murders, including the disappearance of Mary Boyle, Ireland’s youngest missing person. “Most politicians have neither the courage nor the backbone to tackle the critical issue of media ownership in our country, which is having such a harmful effect on the public interest and democracy”, O’Doherty told the gathering. O’Doherty was made compulsorily redundant by the Irish Independent in August 2013 following an investigation into the garda-penalty-points scandal, during which she called at the home of the former Irish police commissioner, Martin Callinan. She later settled her case for unfair dismissal at the unemployment appeals tribunal. “If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear”, she said. “Journalism in Ireland is in crisis, and this is primarily because ownership of so much of the media has been allowed to fall into the hands of so few. A culture of fear has consumed certain newsrooms, creating a stifling environment where some reporters behave less like dogged agents of the public interest, and more like compliant diplomats, spinning for the powers-that-be as if their jobs depended on it”. “They choose to ignore the true function of our still-noble vocation, to hold power to account, to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable, to defend the public’s right to know, and to seek the truth and report it. A robust, independent, adversarial press is the lifeblood of a functioning state and a free society. But in Ireland in 2016 we have nothing close to that”. O’Doherty said that it would be necessary to “smash the cosy cartel that exists between the press, politicians and the police in this country, because it is so harmful to the public good”. “In order to tackle these incestuous relationships, we must talk about the elephant in the room. The fact that the pet-name of the biggest owner in Irish media is ‘Redacted’ says it all. One big voice has far too much power and prominence in our small country. Let’s just look at some of the ways Denis O’Brien has tried to limit press freedom and free speech in our country. O’Doherty noted the proposed “journalists’ charter” introduced at INM in 2013, the court case last year which led (temporarily) to several media outlets being unwilling to report a speech covered by Oireachtas privilege, and said that Transparency International had reported O’Brien to the UN for making legal threats against journalists. “Is it healthy for democracy”, O’Doherty asked, “that someone who takes such an interest in silencing our right to speak be in control of so much of our media? I don’t think so”. O’Doherty also criticised “the lazy propaganda that RTÉ pumps into Irish households night after night”. “There is no doubt that a culture of institutional complacency now dominates RTÉ, where some presenters earn more than David Cameron and Barack Obama, and no one wants to tell us what some of the senior management earn”. “But for me, their greatest failure has been how they have shut the door in the faces of victims. Victims who have damning stories to tell, especially those who have suffered at the hands of An Garda Síochána. O’Doherty said in the case of Mary Boyle, a six-year-old girl who disappeared and was believed murdered in 1977, the authorities “refused to bring the chief suspect in the case4 to justice, amid allegations of garda corruption and political interference”. She said that when she visited a US Congressman in Washington to highlight the case along with Mary Boyle’s sister Ann Doherty RTÉ, “despite countless requests”, refused to inform the public of the visit. And she charged that the national public broadcaster also ignored visits to Stormont, Westminster, and Brussels, and a case against the state instigated by Ann Doherty.

A complaint to the European Commission about the lack of independence of the Irish data protection commissioner could cost the State thousands of euros in daily fines if upheld. POD, the Primary Online Database, wasn’t supposed to be a problem for the government. A single database maintained by the Department of Education containing the full details of every student in the system seemed a perfectly reasonable idea. Who doesn’t love a database to improve efficiency? But when the idea first went public early in 2015, and people who weren’t inside the civilservice and political bubble had a look at it, awkward questions were raised. On 7 January 2015, Elaine Edwards reported in the Irish Times that the details of all pupils would be retained until their 30th birthdays, long after they had completed primary education. The following day, the paper reported that education minister Jan O’Sullivan was “willing to examine” the 30-year rule. A few weeks later, the paper reported on discussions between the Data Protection Commissioner and the Department of Education on the database, while minister Jan O’Sullivan said data would be held for 30 years to ensure “that we have the full maximum data that we need”, a meaningless word-salad. In early February, it emerged that POD had poorly-thought-out ethnic classifications. In short, “White Irish” was a category, but pupils who were not white could not be classified as Irish, only as “Black African” or “other Black background”. That same month, the department rolled out its heavy guns, threatening to defund schools which did not provide data on all their pupils. Further questions were raised over other items sought by POD. PPS numbers; religion; and records of physical or mental issues, learning problems and disabilities, were all sensitive personal information, some of all of which could be shared with the Department of Social Protection, the Health Services Executive, or the National Council for Special Education. By the end of March 2015, the Department began a climbdown, reducing the retention period to until pupils’ 19th birthdays. In June 2015, the Data Protection Commissioner found POD was unlawful, and would require new legislation, by way of statutory instruments. Dublin solicitor Simon McGarr, a father of two primary school-aged children, was one of several people with questions about the project, believing it to be excessive retention of data, much of which was being used for purposes other than that for which it was collected. After phone calls to his local school and then the department failed to provide satisfactory answers, he submitted a series of Freedom of Information requests to the department. The requests were initially refused, and it took until March of this year to have the appeals heard. By this stage, the department had also reluctantly conceded that POD was not compulsory, and could not be linked to school funding. All of the department’s FOI refusals were overturned, with one exception. The Information Commissioner decided that legal advice to the Data Protection Commissioner, which it had shared with the department of education, was privileged communication. That refusal, and the detail it reveals about the communications and decision-making processes involved in POD, have now prompted McGarr to make a complaint to the European Commission. “Here is my complaint”, says McGarr: “It is a requirement, both under domestic Irish data protection regulations and more importantly under article 8.3 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights, that every state ensures that its citizens have access to an independent data-protection authority. I, it turns out on examination of these documents, have never had access to an independent data protection authority. Therefore I am making my complaint both in relation to the data protection commissioner’s behaviour, and about Ireland and the Attorney General’s behaviour as well”. It turned out they were giving the department legal advice which the department relied upon, which was the basis they relied upon for the legislative justification for POD. Therefore the people doing the investigating are the people who came up with the idea in the first place. “This is about my two kids. I wouldn’t have ground on and on like this if the Department of Education had responded properly when the problems arose or the DPC had been able to independently assess my complaint in a timely way,” McGarr added. If the commission finds that Ireland has failed in its duties under European law, it can take a case to the European Court of Justice, and apply daily fines – until an independent data protection authority is created.

Moya Doherty – together with her husband John McColgan – is best known for founding Riverdance, the show that put a modern twist on traditional Irish dance. What began as the interval act during the 1994 Eurovision song contest ended up making Doherty one of the richest women in Ireland. The Sunday Times Rich List recently estimated the wealth of her and her husband at a cold €86m. Following the enormous commercial and cultural success of Riverdance, Doherty was formally admitted to full platinum-card membership of Ireland’s Great and Good. So she got to sit on a number of boards of directors including the Dublin International Theatre Festival (which she chaired for seven years) and The Abbey Theatre. She was also a founding director of radio station, Today FM. She has also received numerous awards and accolades over the years, including the Veuve Clicquot Business Woman of the Year, the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award and Honorary Doctorates from the University of Ulster and from the National University of Ireland in recognition of her ongoing commitment to the business of the arts in Ireland. Following earlier careers in RTÉ, Doherty and her husband established Tyrone Productions. It’s now one of Ireland’s leading TV production companies. For many years she was a director of the company. But when Communications Minister (at the time of writing we’re still waiting for him to go away you know) Alex White nominated Doherty to chair the board of RTÉ, Doherty gave up her Tyrone directorship. In part, that resignation was to avoid any conflict of interest, as Tyrone Productions does a lot of business with RTÉ. But, in part, it would have been to allow Doherty to concentrate on an RTÉ job that imports very considerable challenges. In a recent Sunday Independent article titled “50 influential women over 50”, Doherty was quoted saying “The 50s are a strange time for a woman, both physically and emotionally – a junction when you look both ways, to the past and the future”. It’s the same at RTÉ. The organisation looks backwards to its traditions and the legacy of its founders but it must look forward to a Brave New World where the role of national broadcasters is under severe pressure. The national broadcaster is widely perceived to have done an excellent job marking the 1916 centenary with historical documentaries and drama-documentaries combined with live coverage of set-piece commemoration events. But that’s essentially a throwback to its original role as national broadcaster. RTÉ’s problem is that it faces fundamental challenges to the role. It was all so different when Moya Doherty first left Pettigo, County Donegal, and large swathes of Ireland could only access one broadcaster. Today, satellite television and broadband mean that RTÉ’s rivals can broadcast into Ireland without difficulty. Moreover, specialist channels, that can use narrowcasting to chip away at different elements of RTÉ’s broadcasting audience, now proliferate. RTÉ must face massive threats from the likes of TV3 and Sky Sports – as more and more key events are bought up by commercial operations, and Youtube and Netflix, and people’s screen-time increasingly derives from the internet and new entities that may not have even existed a decade ago. RTÉ’s own annual report shows that its share of total TV viewership dropped from 27.7% in 2014 to 27.0% a year later. Meanwhile TAM Ireland’s survey of viewership habits in 2015 showed that only 80% of all audio-visual content is viewed on a TV set at home. A key focus of the national broadcaster is to protect its status as the main recipient of the TV licence fee. In 2014, this constituted over half of RTE’s revenue. Confronted with a drop in the proportion of people getting their audio-visual product from television, (Alex White’s predecessor as) Communications Minister Pat Rabbitte had floated the idea that the TV licence would be replaced by a household broadcasting charge. The idea that households would have to contribute to RTÉ whether they had a television or not was dreamt up in 2012. Then protests over water charges erupted. That prompted Alex White to say that the switch from TV licence to household charge would not be made until “public understanding and support” had been built. With water charges heading down the drain fast, that’s unlikely to happen anytime soon. So not only is RTÉ’s advertising revenue under pressure but so too is revenue from a licence which it describes as “not fit for purpose”. Some fundamental questions arise for RTÉ concerning its TV-licence income. It may not be appreciated by many but nearly €30 out of every €160 paid for a TV licence actually goes to subsidise RTÉ radio services, with over €35 going to RTÉ 2 to allow us watch such cultural jewels as ‘Friends’ and ‘Home and Away’. RTÉ is vulnerable to the charge that the licence is used as a slush fund to prop up the station regardless of whether any real public interest is in play. This apparent pretence makes RTÉ doubly vulnerable to a sceptical or incisive Minister for Communications. It goes a long way to explain the consistently deferential tone the station displays to the government of the day and to the country’s other governing interests. Whatever about its public service mandate, RTÉ did succeed last year in broadcasting 15 of the 20 most-watched TV programmes. Its bouncy Late, Late Toy Show headed the table. But the three next most-viewed programmes were all Rugby World Cup matches broadcast by TV3, which had outbid RTÉ for the right to broadcast something it had always held close to its bosom in the past. Frighteningly for RTÉ, TV3 has now secured the broadcasting rights for rugby’s Six Nations Championship from 2018 to 2021. When one looks down the list of 2015’s 20 most popular programmes, it’s notable that 12 were sports events such as the All-Ireland Football Final (5th place) and several Euro 2016 soccer qualifying matches (7th and 8th). But now Sky Sports has

Local authorities and the Arts Council agree a framework but don’t engage communities