Black and white and read all over - Ireland's changing media landscape

Chinedu Onyejelem's window looks out over a busy North Frederick Street in Dublin city, the bustle of the evening traffic below so loud that it feels like the cars are in among us. Most of the staff have left for the day, but their desks are still strewn with the daily detritus of every newspaper office: press releases and proofs, notebooks, back issues, half-empty cups of coffee.

This has been Metro Éireann's base since last October, when the paper moved from its former home - a two-room mews on the North Circular Road - in time for its transition from monthly to weekly publication.

The expansion came seven years after Ireland's first multicultural paper was launched by Onyejelem and Abel Ugba as a part-time project funded with a repayable grant of £2,500 and carried into life on a wave of goodwill from local politicians, businesses and migrant groups. Though at the time, Onyejelem remarks, others took a little more persuasion.

"People did not really understand the term multicultural then. It was very new. Also the issue of immigration, even though it has been here with us for so many years and has picked up over the last decade, people were not really sure what it was all about. I think there is more awareness now, unlike when we set up," he says.

The paper's evolution suggests as much: from its nine-room office, Metro Éireann employs "9½" people (eight full-time, three part-time) and prints at least 10,000 copies of a 32-page paper each week. When they ran an advertisement seeking a couple of journalists last year, they received so many applications (more than 200) that they had to hire a human resources specialist to help them through the thicket of CVs. Metro Éireann's "multicultural" patch has not seen too many incursions, but in the seven years it has been in circulation, the market for migrant media has expanded at some pace.

Earlier this month, the Forum on Migration and Communications at Dublin Institute of Technology brought together about a dozen migrant media producers whose expertise it hopes to harness and develop while also allowing their work feed into wider debate. The scale of the sub-industry is apparent to anyone who goes browsing through the shops in central Dublin, where you can find at least three African magazines (Eye, Bold and Beautiful, Xclusive), two Lithuanian papers (Lietuvis, Saloje), three Polish (Polska Gazeta, Sofa, Polski Express), two Chinese (Shining Emerald, Tiao Wang magazine) and one each catering for the city's Russians (Nasha Gazeta), Latvians (Sveiks), Filipinos (Filipino International), and Pakistanis (Pakistan Times).

The magazines are the mixed bag of insight and trivia that every market spawns. Xclusive, for example, is a glossy for Africans, filled with many of the usual preoccupations of women's consumer magazines: fashion, beauty, shopping and photographs of people's weddings. But in parts it reads like a parody of the genre, with a penchant for macho, pre-ironic chauvinism. A recent edition leads with a feature entitled: "Woe-Man!: Things that African Women Do That Annoy Men", where eight men of remarkably similar persuasion offer such nuggets as: "One of the things an African woman would do that would annoy me is not keeping the house clean." (A man from Tyrellstown).

The migrant media market is a space filled with transients, where titles come and go all the time: at least three African papers have gone out of business in the past few years. But thanks to the democratising effect that changes in communications and desktop-publishing technology have had, costs are lower than ever before, and because more people can afford to fail, a greater number manage to succeed.

Rolandas Augutis, editor of the fortnightly Lithuanian paper Saloje, explains how the paper's material is assembled in Dublin and then designed and subedited by a colleague at home in Lithuania. "We give him all the articles and pictures by e-mail, and it's designed over there. Then he sends it to Ennis, where it's printed and distributed around Ireland," says Augutis.

The changes in the print industry are evident in broadcasting too, with local radio stations across the country opening their slots to migrant presenters who might capture an untapped audience.

Across the industry, however, very few immigrants or people from ethnic minorities have so far made the transition to national media. Nonetheless, migrant-produced media continue to flourish, and according to Abel Ugba, that much is an indication of how immigrants' concerns, previously dominated by their legal status and their housing needs, have evolved.

"I think the vast majority have moved from that stage, where they didn't know whether they were staying or going. And therefore the next stage would be: what is my place in this society? Culturally, socially, where do I belong? Through many of these projects, I think many of them are beginning to define who they are, they're beginning to assert their position, to say: 'Look, we're here, we're here to stay, let's talk about it.'"