Crosbies' new flagship must negotiate shark-infested waters

BACKGROUND:When Thomas Crosbie became a reporter in 1850, he would stand in a dinghy in Cork Harbour and shout a welcome to travellers on the big ships en route to London, asking them about the news from America.

In those early days, that was how the Cork Examiner got its scoops.

If only it was so easy to gain competitive advantage in the newspaper business in 2013. Sinking under the weight of its boom-time debt, Thomas Crosbie Holdings could have done with the original Thomas Crosbie’s dinghy to help it stay afloat.

Yesterday’s announcement that the group has gone into receivership has seemed inevitable since last summer, when it emerged that it was in debt restructuring talks with its State-owned banker AIB.

The cracks in its ship were in evidence before that, with a succession of salary cuts for its employees, a shrinking in its overall workforce from more than 800 to 642, the closure of Kerry title The Kingdom and the offloading of titles such as the Sligo Weekender, the Newry and Down Democrat and the London-based Irish Post, which had debts of €2.3 million when it was liquidated in 2011.

Many of these acquisitions were part of a spree by TCH’s former managing director Anthony Dinan that placed unbearable pressure on the group when the recession hit.

The relationship between the company’s management and its employees has been frosty since early last year, when National Union of Journalists members at the Irish Examiner title rejected what management called a “critical” proposal to cut wages by a further 5 per cent.

A life raft of sorts has now been thrown to 554 of the employees by AIB, which will provide further funding to Landmark Media Investments, the holding company to which many of TCH’s assets will now transfer. Its printing operation TCP has been liquidated with the loss of 12 jobs and the Sunday Business Post is set to apply to the High Court to be placed in examinership.

Ability to thrive

In truth, it is difficult to be entirely confident about the ability of the group’s two national titles, the Irish Examiner and the Sunday Business Post, to thrive in the long term, even if freed from their historical debts, but that is certainly the hope and the plan.

The Irish Examiner has one major factor going for it: a readership that is concentrated in one place, which advertisers love. Recent Joint National Readership Survey figures suggest 174,000 of its 189,000 readers are based in Munster, with 136,000 of them located in Cork city and county. Just 8,000 of its readers are in the greater Dublin area.

The Sunday Business Post, meanwhile, is the only Irish-published title in the country to currently have a paywall on its digital edition. It has not stated how many subscriptions it has amassed since it erected the paywall in November 2011, and it remains to be seen whether these payments, added to the diminished print revenues, are high enough to sustain its workforce of 76.

Both the Irish Examiner and the Sunday Business Post saw their print circulations dip below 40,000 in the second half of 2012, a period that saw the circulation of the overall daily and Sunday newspaper markets in Ireland decline by an annual 7 per cent.

The Irish Examiner’s sales are down 30 per cent over the past six years, while the Sunday Business Post has plunged 27 per cent in that time.

These circulation figures lay bare the transformation that has taken place in the media landscape since TCH bought the Sunday Business Post from Trinity Mirror in 2002, as Alan Crosbie, chairman of TCH, has been all too aware.

’Threat to humanity’

Last February, Crosbie gave a forceful speech at a media conference in Dublin that was most notable for his description of the “new media” competition as a “threat to humanity”. Several “new media” lieutenants were in the room at the time and took umbrage.

But online-only outlets were far from the only shark Crosbie could see in TCH’s waters. Ireland was “the only country in the world that has a large number of non-Irish newspapers being sold here”, he noted, while RTÉ’s commercial activity “distorts the market for everybody”, he said.

There was a time, before readers went online and before the Dinan-led expansion, when the Crosbies were expected to sell up and move on.

“The Irish Press went out of business and it was quite a time of flux for newspapers,” Alan Crosbie told The Irish Times in an interview in June 2011. “But then when isn’t it a time of flux for newspapers?”

He lamented what he saw as pressure on readers’ connection to their daily publication of choice. “In this country, you were an Irish Times reader or an Independent reader or an Examiner reader. It was almost like what you drank – you were a Guinness drinker or a Murphy’s drinker. I think it would be a shame if that was lost.”

By one, non-scientific measure – the typical lifespan of a family company – both TCH and its Crosbie-owned successor Landmark are on borrowed time.

Fifth generation

The company placed into receivership yesterday was run by the fifth generation of Crosbies descended from the boat-dwelling Thomas, who rose from scooping reporter status to become editor and owner of the Cork Examiner.

Most family businesses do not last that long, as Alan Crosbie details in his 2000 book on succession planning, Don’t Leave it to the Children.

In effect, the business is now being left to his second cousin Tom Crosbie, who owns Landmark with support from his father Ted (a fourth-generation Crosbie).

“History doesn’t give you a guarantee of longevity,” was Alan Crosbie’s downbeat conclusion of his family business history.

Today, the harbour-shouting methods of Thomas Crosbie would be described as “innovation”. Most people with newspaper ink in their veins would probably just prefer the term “journalism”.