A Different View with Dave O’Connell

Three times in the one week, I found myself in buildings once synonymous with thriving newspapers but now re-imagined for very different purposes – and yet, in two cases, retaining an element of their former soul.

One was close to home, geographically and emotionally, because it was the Connacht Tribune’s home for over 110 years, now re-invented as the hugely successful PorterShed tech hub on Market Street.

It was a fitting venue, therefore, for the launch of the Irish edition of the 2025 Digital News Report, the annual survey undertaken by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, featuring analysis of the Irish data by the DCU Institute for Future Media, Democracy and Society, and sponsored by Coimisiún na Meán.

And it painted a picture that resembled the curate’s egg – very good in parts in terms of trust in local media (newspapers and radio) but still pointing to the elephant in the room which is the question of people paying for news.

But what was lovely was to see so many journalists and media organisations – including old Tribune alumni Bernie Ní Fhlatharta and Harry McGee – back in a building which will forever be enshrined in the history of the Tribune.

When I left the Tribune back in 1989, I moved to the Cork Examiner – and coincidently I found myself back in the Real Capital for the Saw Doctors’ magnificent night at Musgrave Park.

But I also took a stroll down Academy Street, home to the Examiner for over 160 years before relocating to Lapps Quay in 2006.

The place is now a series of homogenous High Street shops at ground level and what I presume to be apartments overhead – little or nothing to suggest that the Examiner was once the beating heart of the city.

Apart from the statue of an Echo Boy around the corner on Patrick Street.

The other former newspaper office I visited was for a longer stay on a few days away in Amsterdam, because the INK Hotel is the former home of the weekly Dutch newspaper De Tijd (The Times), which has gone from 52 editions a year at its peak, down to one a month – and now, as a Magill-type magazine, published ten times a year.

The hotel – as the name suggests – honours its history with a newspaper theme evident throughout; from the old typewriters and cameras dotted around the rooms and the lobby to the wallpaper which is a succession of old negative prints of pages from the paper itself.