Media Marriage, for richer or poorer

As an alum of Dublin’s Metro newspaper, the announcement of its impending merger with the Herald AM in Friday’s Irish Times caused a sharp intake of breath.Metro and Herald AM are reportedly in merger talks, an act of press adultery that brings together three of the most unlikely bedfellows in Irish media, the Irish Times, Independent News & Media, and Associated Newspapers.

It’s a bizarre situation, particularly given the conditions in which Metro set up. The announcement that Associated were going to launch Metro in Dublin prompted INM to launch their own ‘Metro’ as a spoiler, and a safeguard to the Evening Herald’s advertising revenue. The theory was that Metro could cut into the Heddild’s readership and thus, the evening paper’s advertising draw (which recent readership figures seem to rebuff).
A court case over Herald AM using the word ‘Metro’ in its masthead ran and ran, a High Court battle that had the potential to see Metro pulled entirely. Ironically, the disputed paper was to be called Herald Metro, which Associated fought tooth-and-nail to prevent. Now they’re looking at launching the Metro Herald. Both papers survived that scuffle to fight more battles and weather the storms of litter complaints, exclusion from circulation figures and the general collapse of print advertising.

But they survived them only by racking up whopping losses – €11million and counting for Metro by year end 2007, and similar for Herald AM, it is rumoured. (Although, the Sindo took a smug swipe at the Times’ reputation over the merger and its relation to costs at the IT last weekend.)

When I worked at Metro, there were three staff news reporters with the rest supplied by freelancers and wire copy, and the paper was 40 pages thick. For those uninitiated in paper printing, when pages are cut, they tend to go down in fours, and if you’re doing a daily run of 70,000 papers, cutting four pages means 280,000 pages less to print, which saves a lot of paper, in both senses. Since then the number of pages has shrunk below 30. Ad revenue is down – as it is everywhere. Costs have been slashed, and must be cut further.

Although ideologically difficult, the proposed merger obviously makes huge financial sense.

The new paper, reportedly to be called ‘Metro Herald’, will probably turn to INM’s outsourced subbing to cut costs, not to mention their vast resources in sports reporting. Duplicity in distribution will go (along with 100 or so jobs). Two ad sales teams will become one. Two editorial teams will become one. And two into one doesn’t go, so jobs will be cut, cut, cut, no matter how you look at it. Jobs, some of which belong to good people who I know, people who are good at their jobs and could be victims of nothing but circumstance. (Some of whom read this blog and won’t thank me for being a grim reaper). I hope I’m proved wrong and they’re all retained. With a raise.

The cost cuts and the amalgamation of capabilities should allow the new paper to surpass the Metro and the Herald AM in terms of content. I’d hope that the new paper will retain byline journalists, which the Metro always had (and Herald AM didn’t). The only other ‘newspaper’ that gets away without bylines without sacrificing credibility is The Economist. Metro, while not quite at Economist stature, always had at least two named in-house journos (currently Ross McDonagh and Joanne O’Connor), and named its other main contributors, which was always a positively differentiating marker from its Dublin competitor, and one that made it feel like a ‘real’ newspaper instead of just a collection of loosely-assembled wire clippings.

The absence of same made Herald AM feel like something of a ghost paper, every morning’s Marie Celeste. I never met a journalist from Herald AM and one wondered who was, in fact, putting it all together? The end result, say the Times, is likely to be printed at their Citywest press, but where it will be put together, and by whom, is the more ‘pressing’ question.