Irish Times editor Ruadhán Mac Cormaic in the newsroom. Picture: Irish Times
Revenue generated by subscribers to The Irish Times is now fully funding its journalism for the first time.
That milestone includes both digital-only and print home delivery subscriptions (which feature online access by default).
The Dublin-based Irish Times Group (which includes the Irish Examiner based in Cork) has around 150,000 subscribers across print and digital.
Ruadhán Mac Cormaic , who has edited The Irish Times for three years and spent 17 years at the title, told Press Gazette said: “It’s important for the organisation. It’s a milestone, it’s not the destination. And there are other milestones we have to hit.
“I don’t want to pretend that… we have the answer to every question. The world is moving too fast to be certain about anything. But it validates and affirms everything we’ve been doing for the last ten years.”
The former assistant editor, foreign affairs correspondent and legal affairs correspondent said the newsroom has gone from thinking about being digital first, to being audience first or subscriber first.
The Irish Times introduced its subscription model in 2015 and Mac Cormaic said it was always the goal that subscriptions would ultimately cover the entire cost of the journalism.
“Everything we’ve been doing for the last number of years has been about reinforcing that relationship with our subscribers,” he said, adding: “I think journalistically having a subscriber model, or working with subscribers in mind, is a more appealing proposition for a journalist than working purely for reach.”
The Irish Times has a fairly hard paywall giving away access to a small number of articles for free before users are asked to pay. Some pieces of content are subscriber only.
Mac Cormaic said: “We have the largest number of digital subscribers of any news publisher in Ireland, but we also have the highest revenue because we don’t discount heavily. We attach real value to the work we do.”
A standard Irish Times digital subscription costs €14 (£12.19) per month or €135 (£117.50) per year, while a premium package including the e-paper is €20 (£17.41) or €190 (£165.37). The only discount currently available to Irish subscribers is for the first month (for €1). Both packages include New York Times access due to deals the latter publication has been doing to build its international subscriber base.
Mac Cormaic added: “I think one of the one of the original sins of the digital age for news publishers was giving it all away for free because you were, in effect, saying to your readers that you didn’t attach much value to what you were doing.
“We think that by putting what we think is a fair price and a reasonable price on our journalism, and asking people to pay for that, we’re saying that we attach value to it – but we can see that they do too.”
Irish Times profits ‘go back into the journalism’
The 167-year-old Irish Times is owned by a trust, which was established in 1974 to ensure its editorial and financial independence. Mac Cormaic sits on the board alongside his deputy editor, the chief executive and chief financial officer, and six non-executive directors.
Mac Cormaic said: “We have to make a profit to be sustainable, but when we do, that profit doesn’t have to go back to shareholders. It goes back into the journalism or to the services that support the journalism.”
Mac Cormaic said the success comes down to having a team motivated by The Irish Times constitution , which “commits us to an approach that’s rigorous, fair minded, humane, it’s a commitment to being open to divergent views, attentive to the needs of minorities”.
The Irish Times Group, which employs about 840 people in total, has made a profit for the last three years following a loss in 2022 due to rising costs amid the end of the Covid-19 pandemic and the start of the war in Ukraine.
In 2024 ( the most recent figures available ) the group reported steady revenue of €115.6m (£100.7m), up 0.3% compared to 2023, and profit before tax of €4m (£3.5m), up 90% due in part to investment portfolio gains. Reorganisation costs were €3.7m (£3.2m) as a voluntary redundancy programme took place, affecting sections including lifestyle and culture.
Irish Times digital and print reorganisation
After that, a “fairly large-scale reorganisation” took place within the newsroom in 2025, Mac Cormaic said.
Four digital-only live commissioning desks were created for national, international, business and sport news, while a separate print editing and production unit was created.
Mac Cormaic said the ratio of work has now gone from being roughly 2:1 print to digital, to 3:1 digital to print.
Each of the four desks has a print liaison editor so that only one person needs to interact with the print team. The idea behind this was to free up the other commissioning editors so they can think solely about “what’s the best digital way of telling” a story.
Some roles were lost as a result, including night editor and chief sub-editor.
But Mac Cormaic said the changes have resulted in a “better designed and planned” print newspaper because of changes like templating pages earlier in the day, earlier copy deadlines, and imposing rigid story lengths across the digital desks so that at the point of commission, the print team know how long they will be.
“We have more flexibility to react to late breaking stories for print and visually, it looks better because it’s better planned… we don’t have situations, generally speaking, anymore where 2,000 words of text land at eight o’clock in the evening and we’re having to shrink pictures and compress furniture on the page, and ending up with an ugly page.”
Mac Cormaic said the team consulted publishers around the world before doing it and they each “had a slightly different way of doing this”. Some had a “very strict demarcation between print and digital”, he said, putting them in different parts of the building or even in different buildings. But at The Irish Times they remain on the same floor.
“I think ours is a bit more pragmatic, but very effective. I’d like to think it’s very effective, even though we’re still working on it all the time.”
The Irish Times is now in the midst of hiring for jobs including a sports correspondent, an education correspondent and two new video roles (video podcast publisher and video editor).
A reorganisation last year merged the video unit and photo desk to create a visual media department, with a refit of their studio setting them up for video podcasts.
It has also increased the frequency of some of its podcasts and launched a new early morning round-up of four key stories in ten minutes at 6am called Early Edition .
Mac Cormaic said they also continue to invest in newsletters. They now publish 15 in total, of which some are open to all and some are subscriber only, such as the most recent launch Global Briefing by China correspondent Denis Staunton. “We’re pretty happy with how that’s going, but we see opportunities to expand there.”
Irish Times building investigations unit: ‘What our subscribers want’
Mac Cormaic is now hiring for a new investigations unit, set to comprise a senior investigative reporter and a data journalist, working with at least one person from the wider newsroom at any one time seconded to dedicate their time to one project. If it proves successful, he said more hires will follow.
“We want to have a team of people who are working off diary on bigger, high impact projects that require time and investment,” he said, adding: “Ultimately, our job is to hold the powerful to account. If we’re not challenging those in power as a news publisher, what’s the point?
“We can also see that this is what our subscribers want… they want exclusivity. They want depth. They want original analysis. They want creativity. We think increasing our investigative capacity is important.”
Similarly Mac Cormaic said he often asks during editorial conferences: “What are we saying about this story that I can’t get for free on the internet?”
He said they will always publish a “certain amount” of commodity journalism, such as breaking news, as “people come to us every day to find out what’s happening. But very quickly after publishing that story, you have to be asking ‘what are we now going to say on this story that is exclusive to us, and original, and creative, that gives people some extra value?’”
Mac Cormaic recalled conversations in the industry ten to 15 years ago in which people thought news organisations would have to cut back on their international coverage or reporting about the arts ( both of which The Washington Post has just done as part of wider cuts ).
“But guess what, they’re two of the areas our subscribers like most,” Mac Cormaic said.
“We’re publishing more book reviews every week now than we did 15 years ago. A couple of years ago we appointed a China correspondent – one of the few English-language publications that have a full-time correspondent in Beijing. I appointed an Eastern European correspondent last year who works in Ukraine. And our subscribers are heavily engaged with that coverage.”
He noted that “conventional wisdom does shift. People used to say that you could never get anybody to read a long story online or to engage with long-form journalism. Yes, I’m concerned about waning attention spans, as everybody is. I’m concerned that we’re facing an incipient literacy crisis. But the fact is we publish some very long articles and very long podcasts, and we know, because we see it every day, that the audience is there for them.”
Irish Times strives to meet ‘higher benchmark for quality’
Mac Cormaic emphasised the importance of protecting standards across writing, editing, fact checking, verification and ethics “in an era in which our subscribers or users can access any news source in the world. The benchmark, I think, for editorial quality and integrity is higher than ever.
“We can’t compete with The Wall Street Journal or The New York Times or the newsrooms that have 2,000 journalists – but our readers can access those sources. So the benchmark for what quality looks like in the digital age is higher.”
The Irish Times appointed a head of standards last year who is now “deeply involved in longer, more sensitive pieces” and it is now carrying out more internal training and workshops.
Mac Cormaic added that they “talk about how we’re trying to speed up the parts of our operation that need to be faster, and slowing down the parts of the organisation that need to be slower,” in particular in relation to the editing of longer reads.
Mac Cormaic said it remains important under the subscriptions model to reach as many people as possible as “everything, indirectly or directly, depends on that happening”.
He said: “We know that the subscriber model is much like retail. The higher your footfall, the more you’re going to sell. So it’s important to the subscriber model itself that we continue to speak to as many people as possible… we’re not immune to the headwinds that are buffeting every media organisation in the world.”
Advertising remains “an important part” of the business model. The potential impact of Google’s AI Overviews on traffic is therefore still a concern, Mac Cormaic said.
A “significant share” of the Irish Times subscriber base lives outside Ireland, according to Mac Cormaic, including across Britain, the US, Australia and continental Europe. This impacts decisions around commissioning and publishing times.
They include Irish people overseas and English speakers “who may not necessarily have a connection to Ireland but they value the high-quality journalism we do, including our international reporting”.
Irish Times editor: ‘We now know what we have to do’
Mac Cormaic said The Irish Times has learned a lot in the past decade: “We’re working in a ferociously challenging, financial, legal, competitive landscape. I think AI is going to transform our industry as it’s transforming most industries. We are vulnerable, like every news organisation, to external shocks. We’re living through wave after wave of structural change, whether technological or to do with consumer habits.
“We don’t take anything for granted. We have to work our way through all of those challenges. I guess what gives me hope, what gives me confidence, is that we now know what works. We now know how to make an organisation of this scale sustainable.
“If I was in this chair and we were having this conversation ten years ago, I’m not sure I, or anyone else in my position in an organisation like this, could have said we knew how to make this work at this scale. I think we do now, because we have ten years of evidence to show how you make it work.
“That’s not to downplay the challenges we face. It’s not to say that our future success is a given, but we now know, I think, what we have to do.”
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