Another Irish printing press is about to be shut down. Less than 16 years after its opening, the factory located in the Carnbane industrial estate in Newry will, at the beginning of 2023, be closed by its owners, Mediahuis Ireland, the company formerly known as Independent News & Media (INM). It’s the latest in a treble of printing decisions made by publishers that give sad new meaning to the exclamation “stop the press”.
Such outings happen every year now. It was in early 2020 that Mediahuis left its factory in Citywest, Dublin, later selling the presses to Cork-based company Webprint. The Irish Independent publisher was already in print site consolidation mode at this point, having left its Belfast plant five years earlier. Last year, meanwhile, it was News Corp’s turn to announce the closure of its plant in Kells, County Meath, two months after gaining full control of the press.
INM’s Citywest presses started rolling in 2000, those at News Corp’s Kells plant in 2002. The lifespan of print shops born in the 2000s – investments made before newspaper circulation fell in 2007 – is now even shorter, with Newry’s exit from Mediahuis proving that even 16 years for modern media is an eon. Only to non-digital natives – anyone who instinctively feels the 2000s were the day before yesterday – will the trajectory from a gleaming new facility to a mothball target seem remarkably swift.
Printing houses described in the jargon of the time as “state of the art” became assets to be offloaded and replaced by outsourcing arrangements.
One minute Sir Anthony O’Reilly, then chief executive of INM, proudly pretended to read one of his newspapers for a publicity photo op at the launch, and his son Gavin O’Reilly, then chief executive of operating, boasted its abilities for the brilliant impression heatset. The next minute, those tens of millions of investments, made with the support of the development agency Invest NI, became nothing more than a historic outlay on a vision of the future that has since been abandoned.
Printing houses described in the jargon of the time as “state of the art” became assets to be offloaded and replaced by outsourcing arrangements. Mediahuis’ Irish strategy may not be replicated by all publishers, but its decision can only be seen as a consequence of the decline in the print market.
[ Mediahuis to close Newry plant with Irish Times Group to print Irish and Sunday Independent titles ]
The announcement notably coincided with a separate but related announcement by Mediahuis that it was to cease publication of the Fingal Independent, an unprofitable North Dublin weekly. Most notably, it came on Budget Day, just hours after Finance Minister Paschal Donohoe announced that VAT on print and digital newspapers would drop from 9% to 0% from January 1.
Abolition of what industry group Newsbrands Ireland has called an “information, learning and democracy tax” has come too late for the Fingal Independent – a headline that covers areas such as Swords, Balbriggan, Lusk , Rush, Skerries, Malahide and Portmarnock since 1983 – and it will publish its final edition later this month.
Elsewhere, the zero rate is providing financial respite for many other income-seeking titles – even struggling for storage space – at a time when their energy and newsprint (printing paper) costs are rising. The question now is how long this reprieve can be expected to last.
With the exception of the Fingal Independent, the rest of Mediahuis’ national and local portfolio will continue to appear in physical form, printed by third parties. The Irish Times, which already publishes the Sunday World and Herald of Mediahuis titles, will from January publish the Irish Independent and the Sunday Independent.
[ INM to shut its printing plant at Citywest in Dublin ]
That would have been frowning once. If you were to travel back to the decades when the Irish Times had its printing press on Fleet Street and the Independent newspapers had their press on Middle Abbey Street and say loud and clear that one day the Irish Times will print the Irish Independent, workers would rightly guess that something very serious has happened to their industry.
Executives who have signed on to build printing works for INM and The Irish Times at Citywest on either side of the millennium – the plans were unveiled six months apart – could also be surprised if told of the deal.
More recently, however, predictions that this would be the outcome have abounded. Really, there was nothing surprising about the deal at the time it was confirmed.
The conclusion of an agreement with The Irish Times had indeed been recommended to the management of the former company INM by EY consultants in 2018, a year before its acquisition by its current Belgian owners. Mediahuis Ireland, which was fond of printing contracts during the INM days, has simply gone to the other side of these outsourcing deals.
And yet, one can’t help but give the impression that the company, part of a publishing empire headquartered in Antwerp, is closing in on the door marked “digital only”.
In its statement to staff last week, Mediahuis Ireland said its priority was to protect its business as it transitioned to a “digitally-focused news organisation” and that it remained “fully committed to providing national journalism and trusted local in a sustainable way”. You don’t have to be Hercule Poirot to assume that the operational part of this line is “in a sustainable way” or notice that it’s hesitant to say it’s fully committed to supporting print in a foreseeable future.
For now, Mediahuis Ireland remains focused on print logistics. It is the largest wholesale distributor of newspapers and magazines in the market via Newspread (which distributes The Irish Times). But Newspread is just one unit within a larger distribution subsidiary that has branched out beyond publishing, supplying everything from gift bags and pencil cases to cake boxes and bubble wrap.
Amid a plethora of rapidly rising spending, the government’s VAT cut is a compensatory financial lifeline, not a stimulus for growth. It will not be passed on to the reduced print clientele, except perhaps for a brief promotion. Instead, as 2023 approaches, printing is destined to become an increasingly niche business, selling price pressure will only be on the rise, and other titles may still cease. .
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