Irish News drop in standards

[StGallsGAA]

Has anyone else noticed how disappointing the Irish News has become as a paper?  When I lived on the Ravenhill Road I used to get the Newsletter on free door-to-door delivery and wondered how on earth anyone would pay for it.  Now the Irish News is not far behind.  Todays edition was thinner than most free papers and not much better in terms of quality journalism and it has been that way for some time. 

[Tony Baloney]

Has anyone else noticed how disappointing the Irish News has become as a paper?  When I lived on the Ravenhill Road I used to get the Newsletter on free door-to-door delivery and wondered how on earth anyone would pay for it.  Now the Irish News is not far behind.  Todays edition was thinner than most free papers and not much better in terms of quality journalism and it has been that way for some time.

It's Christmas so I wouldn't expect too much in the way of content. They have very obviously set out to have broader appeal in the past few years, but some of the content aimed at women especially is woeful. That column yer woman McCrory does is woeful and a waste of column inches. Maeve Connolly isn't far behind her.

[dodgy umpire]

Has anyone else noticed how disappointing the Irish News has become as a paper?  When I lived on the Ravenhill Road I used to get the Newsletter on free door-to-door delivery and wondered how on earth anyone would pay for it.  Now the Irish News is not far behind.  Todays edition was thinner than most free papers and not much better in terms of quality journalism and it has been that way for some time. 

Have to disagree; It's GAA coverage is second to none and news wise it recently exclusively revealed the health department expenses scandal. Personally I find Paddy Heaney, Brian Feeney and Newton Emerson to be worth the 70p alone.

[StGallsGAA]

Have to disagree; It's GAA coverage is second to none and news wise it recently exclusively revealed the health department expenses scandal. Personally I find Paddy Heaney, Brian Feeney and Newton Emerson to be worth the 70p alone.

The qulaity of it's GAA coverage is totally dependent on who is writing it and the same goes for soccer.  Emerson is amusing and Feeney writes a decent but small column.  Heaney whilst his tongue-in-cheek delivery gets a wind-up out of a few he is is about as balanced as a one legged stilt-walker.

Health Dept Scandal exclusive??  A few execs staying 4 star instead of 3 star??  Hardly a ground-breaking bombshell!  Under FOI this info can be obtained by anyone sending a letter to the Dept Health requesting it.

[dodgy umpire]

Have to disagree; It's GAA coverage is second to none and news wise it recently exclusively revealed the health department expenses scandal. Personally I find Paddy Heaney, Brian Feeney and Newton Emerson to be worth the 70p alone.

It's GAA coverage is totally dependent on who is writing it and the same goes for soccer.  Emerson is amusing and Feeney writes a decent but small column.  Heaney whilst his tongue-in-cheek delivery gets a wind-up out of a few he is is about as balanced as a one legged stilt-walker.

Health Dept Scandal exclusive?? A few execs staying 4 star instead of 3 star??  Hardly a ground-breaking bombshell!  Under FOI this info can be obtained by anyone sending a letter to the Dept Health requesting it.

If that was what had of been printed then I might be inclined to agree with you

[seafoid]

The newspaper business is in serious trouble. Ad income has collapsed and readers are migrating en masse to the internet.
The Irish Times lost over €20 million in 2009. The Irish independent parent company's share price is at rock bottom.
It is even worse in the US.

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/fce9d1d8-e926-11df-aec0-00144feab49a.html#ixzz18lCyWWxr

"As you would expect an old newspaperman to do, Mr Kurtz fretted over the decline in journalistic standards – particularly Deadspin's policy of paying sources. He worried about the way "sleazy stories ooze from the depths of the web" and wind up in the broadsheets. He expressed his hope that The New York Times, for example, would avoid such stories and focus on Afghanistan, campaign finance reform and city contracting. Then he surrendered: "A professional athlete hitting on a team employee is also news," he wrote, "regardless of who breaks it, and those of us in the so-called respectable press had better get used to it." Mr Kurtz finished by informing readers he was quitting the Post after 29 years to work for The Daily Beast website."

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/sep/30/decline-not-fall/?pagination=false

"Now, eighteen years later, the blight has finished off several highly respectable papers, left many others palsied and witless, and reduced print journalism, once a vital element of American popular culture, to the verge of ruin. Its principal causes are quickly explained: a staggering loss of advertising revenue and a startling decline in readers, both ascribed to the Internet. The industry-wide failure of entrepreneurial daring and imagination, as demonstrated by the Washington Post's indifference to Kaiser's alert, is too rarely mentioned, but such complacency was extensive in newspaper boardrooms and probably contributed generously to the ruin.
Low morale in the newsroom probably resulted from a sense that everything that made the paper special was being whittled away in a never-ending series of cost-cutting maneuvers. Newsroom talent was being reduced by buyouts—payoffs to staff members willing to quit—that sometimes resulted in losing reporters and editors of great experience, great skill, and great knowledge not easy to replace. There had been two series of buyouts while Kindred wrote, and there have been others since. Still, the staff is large by most standards and retains some very fine reporters indeed, some of whom publish admirable investigative work from time to time.
Besides the human shrinkage, there has been the customary shrinkage of the paper's physical size to cut newsprint costs, followed by the usual shrinkage in news coverage to cut editorial costs, then a shriveling in the quality of reporting and editing because of the buyouts. Book World, the Post's Sunday book review, after scraping by for several years on what was all too obviously a starvation budget, was unceremoniously killed. Even the comic strips have been shrunk so mercilessly that it is sometimes hard to follow the plot of "Doonesbury" and "Judge Parker'" without a magnifying lens. "

[J OGorman]

Has anyone else noticed how disappointing the Irish News has become as a paper?  When I lived on the Ravenhill Road I used to get the Newsletter on free door-to-door delivery and wondered how on earth anyone would pay for it.  Now the Irish News is not far behind.  Todays edition was thinner than most free papers and not much better in terms of quality journalism and it has been that way for some time.

It's Christmas so I wouldn't expect too much in the way of content. They have very obviously set out to have broader appeal in the past few years, but some of the content aimed at women especially is woeful. That column yer woman McCrory does is woeful and a waste of column inches. Maeve Connolly isn't far behind her.

couldnt agree more. Does Maeve Connolly not realise when copying and pasting articles that other folk  get the same hilarious emails into their inboxes?

But its the only paper I buy regularly, GAA coverage is first class

[Maguire01]

The GAA coverage is great; second to none for a daily paper. Some of the columnists are good too.

Agree totally with the comments on some of those new female columnists - cringeworthy stuff. And those stories derived from FoI requests are just scraping the barrel a lot of the time - lazy journalism; why bother investigating for real news when we can send in a dozen FoI requests and run a big 'scoop' in a few weeks. And even if it's not really that big of a story (i.e. the training and travel in the DHSSPS - most of it happened a few years ago and all totally immaterial to the overall HSC budget), lets pretend it is.

[nrico2006]

The Irish Star has as good as if not better GAA coverage than the Irish News, especially the Tuesday GAA supplement.  Not sure if the version we get up here is the same as what is issued down South though.

[Maguire01]

The Irish Star has as good as if not better GAA coverage than the Irish News, especially the Tuesday GAA supplement.  Not sure if the version we get up here is the same as what is issued down South though.

All pictures and relatively few words if I remember correctly. Plus the rest of it is pure tripe.

[Goats Do Shave]

I enjoy most of the Sports Journo's pieces, bar yer man Archer's columns though.

[oakleafgael]

The Irish Star has as good as if not better GAA coverage than the Irish News, especially the Tuesday GAA supplement.  Not sure if the version we get up here is the same as what is issued down South though.

I'm continually surprised by the amount of Tyrone people who buy the Irish Star after there gutter press actions with the late Cormac McAnellan's fiance.

[red hander]

Has anyone else noticed how disappointing the Irish News has become as a paper?  When I lived on the Ravenhill Road I used to get the Newsletter on free door-to-door delivery and wondered how on earth anyone would pay for it.  Now the Irish News is not far behind.  Todays edition was thinner than most free papers and not much better in terms of quality journalism and it has been that way for some time.

It's Christmas so I wouldn't expect too much in the way of content. They have very obviously set out to have broader appeal in the past few years, but some of the content aimed at women especially is woeful. That column yer woman McCrory does is woeful and a waste of column inches. Maeve Connolly isn't far behind her.

Agree ... it's like reading the ramblings of an 8-year-old girl who likes to dress up in her mother's clothes and shoes, a total embarrassment.  She's supposed to be the paper's West Belfast correspondent, an area I live in, but you never see any news stories in the paper from her ... she doesn't even have the wit to lift stuff from the Andytown News ... why worry about doing your job when you can get away with picking up a pay cheque by writing about Sex and the City and eye blusher every Friday ... rant over

[Lecale2]

Stopped buying it a few weeks ago for all the reasons mentioned. The business news is still fairly good and Newton is worth reading even it you don't agreed with him but that's it IMO. It has only half the pages it used to have it seems and the wemens stuff is embarrassing. A full page every day on soap operas, Govt press releases published without comment or analyses, Kenny Archer and Eamonn O'Hara writing about sport, more and more news filed by PA. Other than them two (Archer and O'Hara) the sport isn't bad.

[Milltown Row2]

Would agree that the Irish Star has a better GAA sports content as the Irish News only really has stuff about the bogball, but the rest of the Irish Star  is shite