Why has the newspaper market in Ireland bucked the downward trend evident in Britain? In the north, the Irish News managed to improve its weekday average sale by 1.5% while its nationalist competitor, Daily Ireland, returned an increase of 0.3%. The numbers are small, amounting to hundreds of copies only. But given the state of the market elsewhere, this is a noteworthy success. It shows once again the appetite for news among people who, many years into the peace process, remain intensely interested in the politics and culture of their communities. It's noticeable that the papers traditionally bought by unionists, the Belfast Telegraph and the News Letter both lost more than 5% of their sales.
Away from the major cities, there are similar signs of nationalist papers doing well. The Tyrone Herald, founded just two years ago, has recorded a wonderful 37.4% year-on-year improvement. True, the overall number is relatively small at 5,454, but I was talking to the deputy editor, Maurice Kennedy, and he tells me that they have recently been selling close to 6,000 a week. Its sister title, the Fermanagh Herald, also managed a slight increase to 13,029, as did its unionist rival, the Impartial Reporter, rising to 14,366. The remarkable fact is that there are only about 50,000 people in their overall circulation area, so it's obvious that some households are taking both titles.
Leaving aside political differences, what these figures illustrate is the importance to papers of settled communities. The same kind of circulation story is replicated in the rural areas in the rest of Ireland, north and south. There is much less geographical movement in Ireland and the local papers, with their accent on pictures of local events and sporting achievements, are important reading for families. The editors and journalists also tend to be drawn from those local areas and understand exactly what is wanted by their readers. It is the breakdown of stable communities in Britain that contribute to the falling sales of local and regional papers, and the staff are too often parachuted in without any genuine local knowledge.
