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.
Quote from: StGallsGAA on December 21, 2010, 10:32:43 PM
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.
Quote from: StGallsGAA on December 21, 2010, 10:32:43 PM
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.
QuoteHave 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.
Quote from: StGallsGAA on December 21, 2010, 10:51:21 PM
QuoteHave 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
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. "
Quote from: Tony Baloney on December 21, 2010, 10:37:40 PM
Quote from: StGallsGAA on December 21, 2010, 10:32:43 PM
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
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.
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.
Quote from: nrico2006 on December 22, 2010, 10:48:29 AM
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.
I enjoy most of the Sports Journo's pieces, bar yer man Archer's columns though.
Quote from: nrico2006 on December 22, 2010, 10:48:29 AM
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.
Quote from: Tony Baloney on December 21, 2010, 10:37:40 PM
Quote from: StGallsGAA on December 21, 2010, 10:32:43 PM
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
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.
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
Don't mind Kenny Archer's stuff. Brendan Crossan's is average at best and can't stand a lot of his cheerleading of the McGourty's. Like Heaney's stuff but never, ever read Eamonn 'why use one word when ten will do' O'Hara's stuff.
I buy the Irish news for GAA coverage and always buy another paper for quality news and insight.
Bottom line.. The Irish News is excellent for Sport and mainly GAA. They have sharp angles are usually on the money as things happen and have some quality respected journos.
As for the rest of the paper.. God help us. As has been mentioned above, it is just filler. As for Meabh Connolly, I flick past at speed in case I catch sight of yet another cringe worthy headline. A full page of soap info? Jesus, Irish News, wise up!
QuoteAgree ... 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
Is that your woman Grainne? My wife said her article on Beauty Sleep in yesterdays paper has appeared in several other cheap rags and was lifted verbatim off on Yahoo a week or two ago. The missues is easily pleased as regards journalism and skims through all those throwaway glossys to unwind so when she criticises a so called 'columnist' there must be something in it. I d/k what these dolls are paid but a school-kid on work experience could cut and paste from a website.
Brendan Crossan is well above average. I think he's a first class writer and has a good grasp of different sports. That column he did a month or so ago on his da's friend who had just died was a brilliant piece. Kenny Archer is very bad as a columnist, no doubt about it, but I'm sure he has plenty of other values as a journalist - i think he's deputy sports ed now? Eamonn O'Hara is just ok at the feature writing, seems that boxing is his area of expertise rather than GAA, but I don't follow boxing so I wouldn't read that stuff.
The news is to a high standard and better than the Tele or Newsletter anyway, especially now that David Gordon is leaving the Tele. Brian Feeney is a great commentator, Newtown Emerson is good, Roy Garland is excellent too come to think of it. So for political insight they're pretty well covered.
Those columns by Meabh Connolly and Marie-Louise McCrory are completely shite but sure we obviously aren't the target audience of them so just flick on? The paper is a business at the end of the day and they're obviously trying to attract female readers. Though I think they're insulting women's intelligence by targeting them with that shite.
Barry McCaffrey and Alison Morris in particular are top drawer reporters as well, they obviously have good sources in and around Belfast and their news reporting is excellent. There just isn't as much news around Northern Ireland these days with the political institutions relatively stable, so I would say that would explain why it's a bit threadbare at times. Overall i think it's still a very very good paper and I never miss a copy. I don't know what sort of standards yous boys have, yous just like giving out
QuoteI don't know what sort of standards yous boys have, yous just like giving out
Read the headline again. Standards have slipped. Do you think it's as good as it was a while ago, or even better?
2 pages on Irish News journalism and no-one has mentioned Benny Tierney yet....shame on yiz all :D
Quote from: 5 Sams on December 23, 2010, 04:03:56 PM
2 pages on Irish News journalism and no-one has mentioned Benny Tierney yet....shame on yiz all :D
Ok, I will. He isn't funny. Never has been, and never will be.
'Though I think they're insulting women's intelligence by targeting them with that shite.'
Nail on head
A lot of you seem to read the women's section. Women.
Safer off reading nuts/zoo.
Quote from: oakleafgael on December 22, 2010, 03:04:20 PM
Quote from: nrico2006 on December 22, 2010, 10:48:29 AM
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.
??? What's that all about?
I read the paper every day but these past few months I have felt the standards have dropped big time!!!
Archer's standard has plummeted since his latest venture took off:
(http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5288/5285900567_b37c9f7bc2.jpg)
Quote from: ONeill on December 23, 2010, 09:01:28 PM
Archer's standard has plummeted since his latest venture took off:
(http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5288/5285900567_b37c9f7bc2.jpg)
Bow Street Mall, Lisburn?
Spot on. Tried to go in to that shop today but the children kept pulling me back. For some reason they were afraid of it.
Quote from: ONeill on December 23, 2010, 09:05:36 PM
Spot on. Tried to go in to that shop today but the children kept pulling me back. For some reason they were afraid of it.
Just at that very spot today two spides were knocking f**k out of each other.
Quote from: Minder on December 23, 2010, 09:03:51 PM
Quote from: ONeill on December 23, 2010, 09:01:28 PM
Archer's standard has plummeted since his latest venture took off:
(http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5288/5285900567_b37c9f7bc2.jpg)
Bow Street Mall, Lisburn?
Was about to say the very same thing! It must be a one-off.
Have to say I enjoy a bitta paddy heaney, plus he seems to respect tyrone and as a derryman, that's almost forbidden. While I am a sleaze, I do cringe at Ms Mc crorys man friday, they are usually boggin.....
dont buy it as much as i used to and when i do it's mostly just to read paddy heaney.fed up with crossan and antrim headlines,who the f**k cares if antrims sub keeper was dropped?and dont start me on his lazy journalism eg 2 page spread on a upcoming derry monaghan game,crossan takes up a 1/4 of a page talking about joe diver and how he could be the difference in derry winning and losing and right underneath is derrys team for the match and diver isnt even on!!thats just one of many.
Today's excuse for a leading story really nails this argument ::)
It's still the standardbearer for NI doubt about that, the Newsletter is pretty much a joke of a newspaper, the telegraph can a bit all over the shop at times, a good edition followed by woeful. thought the Healthservice expenses stories was bigtime overkill. Emerson is excellent, but 90% of his columns are about gutting the public sector, eh... we get it Newton, bit of variety plz. Still giving Jim Gibney a platform, what is that about, totally totally pointless drivel(only read Feeney & Garland). The womens stuff has always appeared shite to me, I just assumed that maybe someone liked it as it wasn't aimed at me, but judging by the responses here, maybe not.
As for the sports, Heaney is the market leader IMO, young Corn is doing very well thou too. Rarely read Crossan or rArcher, O'Hara is decent for the boxing, not the GAH. The horseracing is still the worst coverage in the market, every year I return their survey saying it is brutal. Worst price guides, least info and 'naps' that rarely are above evens.