The Irish Times of 22nd February 2007 took 17 pages to get to the Editorials and Letters. Beyond this high tide mark the paper of record breaks down into what may be described as special interest ghettos- Business, Sport, Law Reports, Listing and Classifieds.
By way of contrast the Property Supplement which accompanied the same day’s paper was 38 breathless pages of advertorials, ads, advertising features, feature adverts and press releases from and for the benefit of property developers.
It is an undiscussed presumption that supplements won’t be held to the same journalistic standards as those first 17 pages, where the soul of the paper resides. But, in theory at least, there must come a point where the bromides and plaudits of the property pages become what you’ve mostly paid €1.60 to be exposed to and the other 17 pages become the afterthought.
The difference between the Property Supplement and the other PR reprint, ad-bait supplements (Business, Health, Motors) from the rest of the Irish Times’ week is the price we have paid in examinations forgone of the impact of property development on our society.
The Irish Times, with its trust ownership status, was the best placed to show what it would mean to allow the building of commuter belt estates and other forms of urban spread for the lives of the people who live there, their families and neighbourhoods. Frank McDonald has struggled to do exactly that, and it would be churlish to ignore his work but the scale of the impact of these choices demanded more than a lone voice. The Irish Times could have started a full debate, with a range of voices and opinions as well as research based reporting on what this kind of builder-led development would mean for us all.
Instead it chose to set McDonald’s articles amongst a cacophony of articles such as ‘Mixed village developments with wide appeal’, ‘Delgany fit-outs should turn heads’ and reports of ‘Homes with a park view’ [in Finglas].
None of these articles are marked as advertising features. All are complete with the Estate agent’s guide price presented as gospel . These prices have tended to be unreliable, as the journalists must know- any gospel they appeared in should definitely qualify as one of the apocrypha.
Other papers show naked property price boosterism. (See the Sunday Independent’s characteristically hysterical and schizophrenic demands of the government to deliver stamp duty cuts, but also do something to stop the market cooling which talk of cuts produces). But the Irish Times Trust exists to further the interests of its readers. It is right that we expect a higher standard from its paper. With bitter regret I have to say that when it comes to property development, it has failed us.
An aside:
Kathy Foley of the Sunday Times recently said that our Paper Round analysis was frustrating. One of the reasons she gave was that she felt that we had unrealistically high standards. I’m not blind to the huge income stream the Irish Times, and other papers, draw in from their property pages. I know that they would argue that I get the benefit of that money in paying for the 17 pages of newspaper I mentioned at the start.
But I don’t accept that argument. I don’t have any problem with newspapers taking ads- as long as there is no possibility of those ads misleading the reader into thinking that they’re seeing journalism. That’s why advertising features are labeled as such, and why I don’t object to them at all.
But the Irish Times has a Property Editor not a commercial editor in charge of the Thursday supplement. And that means they have a duty to their readers to reach for an ideal journalism, even if they never achieve it. It would be a bit of a waste of everyone’s time if readers only demanded that their papers be slightly less mediocre, because to do anything else was difficult. It is difficult to make things better- no argument about that from me. But so is everything worthwhile. And from the point of view of the reader of a paper, excuses for reprinting press releases or taking the word of vested interests at face value are as irrelevant as hearing from Tesco about how difficult it is to keep mince fresh through a hugely complex supply chain if your meat is rotten.
For the reader, the result is the same- they’ve bought something that stinks. They’ll be slower to trust it again next time.
26 Comments
As one of the celtic tiger cubs who believed the hype that as I moved outwards from the city the public transport services to support life and living would come on stream, I concur with Simon. Simply put – the moral panic (and I use that phrase in the sociological sense) that overhyped property supplements creates means that a certain degree of objectivity is lost by people who “have to get on the ladder”. If the property supplement in the Irish Times did something like running features on the piddle poor rail and bus links to rural dormer communities on the opposite page to ads for those self-same communities at least there would be a bit of balance. Why don’t they do a feature on the looming teenage wasteland that exists in a lot of these areas where 1000s of houses have sprung up with no facilities or services for the children of these communities to avail of as they get older.
Mrs Tigger and I got out of one such hell hole not a moment too soon. The cute 11 year olds who lived around us were rapidly turning into vacant teenagers with nothing to do but kick down fences and go knacker drinking in the lanes between the houses.
Ticking timebomb for drugs, crime and all the other stuff that the Star or the Indo will leap onto at half a chance.
In my days in Trinners (don’t worry, I’m really a savage mucker, despite my eventual mastery of Anglo-Saxon) I used to enjoy seeing renowned local Chaucerian and rugby enthusiast Gerald Morgan dispose of his unwanted IT property section in the bin outside the Student’s Union shop almost every day. Mind you, he did have rooms on campus.
you raise some excellent points about development. the lack of critical coverage, besides something called ‘the tribunals’, which are more drawn out than this sentence and harder to understand, of property development is one of the great failures in irish journalism history.
Nothing affects us more on a daily basis than the way Dublin (where i live) is laid out. And yet no coverage, just streams of ads for these hideous apartment blocks in finglas and ballymun and pebble dashed two beds in athlone. development is a massive issue – the price of property is driving people out to these suburbs with no facilities, it’s driving out our sports clubs, small businesses, everything that makes dublin what it is, everything that gives it character and sets it apart, it’s all being swallowed up by the builders buck. And…silence.
there’s a lot more to this than i mention but i’m too worn out from commuting to go.
keep up the good work, this is a great blog. papers review radio and tv but not other papers – we need this blog.
As I have lived in a village and use a traditional coal fire with a back boiler, I dispose of Property and Jobs and Finance supplements by using them to light my evening sitting room fires. In 1984 I paid 24,500 punt for my semi-detached three-bed dormer bungalow with front and rear gardens. It’s awful what young home buyers have to go through nowadays. Wading through property supplements must add to the torture.
The aquiring of myhomes.ie also adds to the conflict of interest in terms of how to report on urban change. Is it too much to expect a quality national newspaper to focus on what is the biggest factor changing Irish life, considering that increasing crime levels are closely associated with increased urbanization, as highlighted by the Gallup poll. However, to sound alarm bells now about this would go completely against their significant business interests both inside the paper, in terms of advertising revenue from the property suppliment and outside of it with regard to myhomes.ie. It’s a scandal, really. But who’s going to complain about it: The Irish Independent, The ‘don’t set your standards too high’ Sunday Times or RTE?
Come off it! You are having a go at the Irish Times property supplement. What next? Criticising the horoscopes for their lack of facticity? Complaining that the television guide is nothing more than an advertisement for TV channels?
The only people who read the IT property supplement are people who are looking to buy houses or Tuppenceworth/Paper Round analysts. You must think people are thick if they browse through it as they would the main paper, subliminally absorbing property developers’ propaganda and thinking it is news.
So what if the editor of the property supplement is called the property editor, not the commercial editor? He/she is probably called that to differentiate themselves from the paper’s overall commercial editor. Who knows; more importantly, who cares? Nobody who works for or who reads that section of the paper is under the impression that it is anything other than a commercial supplement.
Newspapers make most of their money from advertising. That’s why supplements are especially important and they have proliferated in recent years. They subsidise the cost of the regular paper.
Do you expect the Irish Times to cut off the revenue generated by its property supplement because of your perception that it influences the journalistic content? I say ‘perception’ because you have offered no proof whatsoever that this is taking place, just a vague insinuation, tantamount to a slur.
You claim:
“The difference between the Property Supplement and the other PR reprint, ad-bait supplements (Business, Health, Motors) from the rest of the Irish Times’ week is the price we have paid in examinations forgone of the impact of property development on our society.???
“The Irish Times could have started a full debate, with a range of voices and opinions as well as research based reporting on what this kind of builder-led development would mean for us all. Instead it chose to set McDonald’s articles amongst a cacophony of articles such as ‘Mixed village developments with wide appeal’, ‘Delgany fit-outs should turn heads’ and reports of ‘Homes with a park view’ [in Finglas].???
Wrong. McDonald’s articles appear in the main body of the paper, not the property section. There’s no cross-pollination. Get your facts straight.
As for the examinations foregone to which you allude, I searched for articles on the Irish Times website for the past 12 months using some search terms: for ‘planning regulations’ I found 197 articles containing this search term in the Ireland News section, 35 in the Opinion section; for ‘traffic’ the breakdown was 715 in Ireland News, 90 in Opinion; ‘urban sprawl’ – 13 in Ireland News, 8 in Opinion; ‘transport’ – 929 in Ireland News, 188 in Opinion; ‘transport 21’ – 133 in Ireland News, 24 in Opinion; ‘traffic gridlock’ – 13 in Ireland News, 4 in Opinion; ‘property developers’ – 1,000+ in Ireland News, 723 in Opinion.
In the volume of articles the Irish Times regular section has published in the past year, I don’t know how significant you will find these numbers but it doesn’t seem to me that they are ignoring the issues or covering anything up for nefarious purposes.
Campaigning individuals with a strong interest in planning and development issues will probably always feel more attention should be paid to their areas of interest but to allege that the Irish Times journalistic staff is compromised by its property supplement is unsubstantiated bullshit.
Do you really think property developers are ringing the Irish Times telling them to ‘lay off’? Maybe you feel the IT editorial staff are unconsciously engaging in self-censorship?
Why would they? You have to ask yourself the question: if tomorrow the IT decided to become a campaigning newspaper for planning and development issues, would that deter property owners from advertising in the paper? Not a bit. People still have to buy houses, and agents still have to sell them. It might even work in favour of house sellers to be associated with a popular, feelgood campaigning product (the IT in marketing terms).
The increasingly conspiratorial tone of your analysis is becoming farcical. Much of what Paper Round did was valid. This, emphatically, is not. The great thing about conspiracy theories is that they make you feel justified in your own lack of action.
“You have to ask yourself the question: if tomorrow the IT decided to become a campaigning newspaper for planning and development issues, would that deter property owners from advertising in the paper? Not a bit”
Then why doesn’t the times do so? This is the entire point of the article – a supplement headed Sport can usually be relied upon to be about Sport, likewise Business. But the Property supplement is an advertising supplement that hasn’t the decency to call its self one.
By the way, if your timetable isn’t fully taken up with being our most loyal reader, I suggest you look up the word conspiratorial. It doesn’t mean what you think it means
An excellent piece.
Niall: actually, MacDonald’s pieces on the wider environment appear in the main body of the paper, but his – always thought-provoking – pieces on urban planning appear in the Property section. That is one reason why those of us who are (no longer) looking to buy a house, and are not Tuppenceworth analysts, read the Property Section.
There is a strange disconnect between the agenda in the main part of the paper and that in the Property wing. For example, a couple of weeks ago the main section had a very good examination of the proposed EU regulations regarding car emissions – while the same day’s property wing had an article advising punters on how they could pave over their front gardens to create room for cars.
Donagh, you rightly point out the dangers inherent in the IT’s acquisition of myhome.ie. Those dangers were exemplified in the vacuous advertorial content of the ‘House and Garden’ supplement (sub-titled ‘a special report’)distributed with yesterdays IT …
“Then why doesn’t the times do so?”
How the hell do I know? Every crank in the country would like the Irish Times to campaign for their particular agenda. Newspapers aren’t lobby groups. Over the past few years I have read articles by IT columnists critical of planning so I dispute the claim that the IT is SUPPRESSING debate on the issue because of commercial considerations, which was really the crux of Simon’s article. I have provided some cursory evidence that planning and infrastructure issues are not being ignored by the IT. I’m not standing up for the IT, I’m attacking groundless rubbish.
“But the Property supplement is an advertising supplement that hasn’t the decency to call its self one.”
I think somebody who chooses to buy the IT instead of The Sun probably has enough wherewithal to figure it out for themselves, Fergal.
Property is not comparable to Sport or Business as these appear in the main body of the paper each day and have their own supplements for extra coverage once a week.
“By the way, if your timetable isn’t fully taken up with being our most loyal reader, I suggest you look up the word conspiratorial. It doesn’t mean what you think it means”
Typical pedantry. It’s probably something they teach you in lawyer school – focus on some trivial detail to deflect from the issue at hand. Helps to confuse uneducated defendants, no doubt.
Alex,
“There is a strange disconnect between the agenda in the main part of the paper and that in the Property wing.”
You’ve just proved my point. Thanks.
Jesus, Niall. Planning is one issue – but the people in this country have been thrown to the developer wolves by the Government for 15 years and the press has done nothing to campaign for better building regulations or even the enforcement of the not particularly stringent ones in place.
We’ve stored up massive problems for ourselves going forward and the so-called fourth estate has done nothing to call our leaders to account.
And you think that has nothing to do with the fact that they’ve made so much money from the ads those self-same developers have placed in their newspapers during the property market boom.
Ever since they put the internets on your computer, you’ve been making a terrible fool of yourself.
““There is a strange disconnect between the agenda in the main part of the paper and that in the Property wing.???
You’ve just proved my point. Thanks.”
No, he didn’t. It’s a clear case of punches pulled, credibility gaps and a failure to adopt a coherent, public interest line.
Not since Richard Waghorne’s bloggin heydey has someone so spectacularly and consistently managed to miss every single point reasonably put to him.
The idea that those who provide revenue tend to influence content is not exactly a radical one, in fact it’s so well known and widely accepted that it is a basic assumption of scientific publishing and one that is backed up by lots of empirical research.
In scientific publications of any repute, authors are required to list any conflicts of interest that they may have – principally whether they have received any funding whatsoever from any party that may have some sort of interest in the outcome of the research – no matter how indirect or small this influence may be. Researchers who do not make their readers aware of their competing interests face the ruin of their reputations and their careers if these interests are discovered. Note that it is enough to show that there is an unrevealed conflict, you don’t have to show that there was any effect of the conflict in the published material. For example, Dr Andrew Wakefield’s (the MMR-autism guy) research, reputation and career faced complete and utter ruin when his funding by litigant groups was revealed.
Now, scientific publishing already has a large number of checks and balances that normal commercial publishing lacks. All material is peer-reviewed by experts, all claims need to be backed up by references or results from rigorous, repeatable experiments. Even with all of these hurdles to jump, it is universally accepted that influences derived from funders are more than capable of skewing the results. Indeed, in November of last year, the BMJ published a special issue on the hidden influences and biases introduced by corporate funding of medical research. All the evidence suggests that, even in the most rigorously controlled publishing models and even when dealing with people who have very high levels of ethics expected of them, funding is a significant determinant of content.
Given this, and the overwhelming body of evidence supporting the existence of such an influence, to dismiss all talk of it as ‘conspiratorial’ is really dumb.
Copernicus,
The allegation in the article is that the IT has suppressed information and debate, a claim for which no evidence has been provided. You may feel the IT should have a campaigning agenda, or that the quality of its coverage should be better – that is fair enough, that is your point of view, and if that is what the article stated I would have no problem with that. But the article insinuated that IT staff were stifling debate out of commercial interest, a claim borne out of nothing but idle conjecture. I have personally read pieces over the past few years that have addressed these issues, and have provided some cursory evidence that these issues are being covered in the past year. If you can provide evidence to the contrary, please do.
Personally I don’t expect the Irish Times to solve these issues, just to give the public the facts. Its up to the citizens, through their voting choices or lobbying activity, to initiate change. To my mind, the IT has provided the facts.
Chekov,
Advertising is central to the media and I am well aware of the potential for commercial interests to influence content. That is a given. But because something has the potential to influence it doesn’t automatically follow that it does. To automatically assume a conspiracy on behalf of the IT/property developers because of some quasi-Marxist worldview is as dumb as to dismiss it altogether, which I never did. I am just asking for that most basic of requirements when somebody makes an allegation, ie back it up. If there is proof, present it.
The example of drug trials is not particularly relevant. The specific outcome of those trials has a verifiable economic impact on companies that might sponsor them. In instances like this one has to ask the question: what would the Irish Times get out of suppressing reporting and analysis of planning/infrastructure? If it didn’t would the advertising dry up?
I doubt it. The IT is one of a few papers that publishes a weekly property supplement and it reaches one of the widest sections of the population in one fell swoop of all media. A few more articles per week critical of housing development and infrastructure issues would hardly see an exodus of property advertisers. If readership rose in line with more articles on planning/development I’m sure advertisers would stay put. The IT’s primary incentive is to maintain/raise readership levels, and I trust they’re intelligent enough to know that the way to do that is through articles that appeal to their readers.
“If readership rose in line with more articles on planning/development I’m sure advertisers would stay put. The IT’s primary incentive is to maintain/raise readership levels, and I trust they’re intelligent enough to know that the way to do that is through articles that appeal to their readers.”
If a paper’s raison d’etre is simply to put the most bums on seats, then the notion of a fourth estate is dead and any more talk of it should be treated as derisively as it deserves.
They should just fill every paper with tits and advertising and have done with it. Any claims to provide a public service, holding the powerful to account and acting as a counterweight to vested interests and the State is a nonsense in the Niall dispensation.
While the Irish Times will certainly want to do a bit better than cover its costs, (hence some of the more negative trends we’ve seen from D’Olier Street) it still has a pretention to the above and if one were to suggest that its editorial policy were simply to tailor stories to appeal to readers, I think you’d get an earful from Madame Editor.
PaperRound is about determining how much of that earful is cant. If the editorial policy were as Niall suggests, we’d be taking a very different tack.
Niall et al…
When you endure a 2.5 hour commute each way each day (except the nights when you sleep on couches of friends and family in Dublin while missing your famly down home) while awaiting the upgrades to the rail service to the county town you moved to because of the much hyped social benefits while at the same time seeing halcyon descriptions of properties FURTHER south being advertised as being within commuting distance from Dublin then one has no option but to question how critically balanced the opinion in the property supplements of ANY paper are.
When the adverts refer to a proposed upgrade to key infrastructure, balanced reporting should present any caveats on that – “Rail service to be upgraded soon” should be challenged with “but the rolling stock hasn’t been bought and the Union issues have to be sorted out and even then…”
The sales schtick goes unchallenged. Frank McDonald’s excellent writing on the unsustainability of our current commuter culture are buried in the main body of the paper. That subtle distance means that point and counter point are not present in the Property Supplement. Perhaps if the Property Supplement took a tack like the “Head to Head” debates in the main IT over the past few weeks we might be on to something.
“10 reasons to buy in Termonfeckin” vs “100 Reasons to flee Termonfeckin”.
That said, I have it on good authority that the changes to the bus timetable that were trumpetted in the IT supplement 7 years ago when we bought first are finally mooted to come in over the summer.
Yippeee.
Copernicus,
“if one were to suggest that its editorial policy were simply to tailor stories to appeal to readers, I think you’d get an earful from Madame Editor.”
Your arrogant leftist assumption is that increasing sales figures and providing a public service are mutually exclusive. The IT appeals to a certain segment of the population. If Geraldine Kennedy decided to fill the main body of her paper with tits and advertising I doubt if it would result in sales going up, as you so condescendingly suggest; in fact, I’m sure it would be the death knell of the paper as it would alienate its traditional readership and the IT could almost certainly not compete in the crowded tabloid market. The idealist concept of the Fourth Estate is fine, but for it to be anything other than empty rhetoric it demands an audience – not an audience at all costs or above anything else, but a viable audience nonetheless, both for the IT’s economic survival and for public service reporting to translate into any kind of social change through influencing a wide section of society. Geraldine Kennedy credits her audience and potential audience with a certain level of intelligence; you obviously don’t.
Celtic Tigger,
No offence, but I would pay as much attention to what I read in a commercial supplement as I would to somebody who turned on my doorstep selling real estate. I trust you didn’t close a sale based on what you read in the property supplement.
You must have failed every comprehension test you ever sat.
I have no response to the bullshit strawman you’ve constructed.
Maybe you should try reading the comments more than once.
Niall
My point was simply that the Property supplement lacks balance in that the puffery of estate agents goes unchallenged, except for general commentary by Frank McDonald either in snippets in the Property supplement or in the main paper. That you yourself would lend the supplement as much credence as you would a door-to-door estate agent simply supports that point.
The missus and I accepted there is risk inherent in all property transactions and took the puffery with a pinch of salt and did some checking of our own, but thanks for your concern.
However, if the levels of risk or other issues were more clearly communicated (eg “yes there will be a train service, but no there aren’t any tracks yet and there is no money to buy them etc, see Frank McDonald’s piece on failures in joined up planning on page 5 for more”) then there would be more informed purchasing or perhaps even better more informed planning and development with some joined up thinking from central and local government. Frank McDonald’s pieces are excellent but get somewhat lost in the mix in the supplement at present.
Also, does the fact something is in a commercial supplement absolve editors from asking whether or not the claim being made is valid or correct or does the fact that something is a commercial supplement mean that any old guff and puffery can be published without any substantive review, critique or counter point in the editorial?
I’m surprised you have no response, Copernicus, but I’m not surprised you don’t have a reasonable one.
Celtic Tigger,
Commercial supplements are essentially conduits for advertisements and should be treated as such. I wouldn’t expect the IT or any paper to have negative coverage in a commercial supplement, provided it does not shirk its responsibility in the main body of the paper where the real news and analysis is.
Niall
The question wasn’t whether negative coverage was required but whether overhyped, inaccurate or potentially misleading claims should be challenged and/or clarified. Surely that clarification should be made as close as possible to the original claim rather than in a different section entirely of the paper?
What if we were discussing a Health and Nutrition supplement and the claim was made by an advertiser that their schamboozle juice (or somesuch) could cure a terminal ailment. Would that type of commercial puffery go unchallenged or would that just be negative comment in a commercial supplement?
I’ve read reviews of cars in the Motoring supplement of the IT where manufacturers claims re: fuel efficiency are, if not dismissed as fiction, certainly questioned and wrapped in the finest robes of pure caveat. Why is there no questioning of Estate agent advertorial?
I would LOVE to see a comment on “commuting distance from Dublin” which said something like “If you leave at 4:30am, before traffic and have a good tailwind..”, or where claims re: “close to public transport” are put in some sort of context (how far, what mode of transport, how frequent are services currently?).
I’m sure newspapers have some responsibility to monitor the ads that appear in their publications but its not their primary job and I doubt if they research advertisers’ claims in-depth, nor would I expect them to. Once there is clear demarcation between what is advertisement and what is journalistic content, that is about as much as a paper can do. It is unreasonable to expect them to redirect resources from their core reporting and analysis functions to research the claims of each ad that appears in the publication. Ads often arrive in at the last minute anyway so it wouldn’t even be possible to do this all the time. An advertisement that is found to be misleading can be reported to the Advertising Authority.
“What if we were discussing a Health and Nutrition supplement and the claim was made by an advertiser that their schamboozle juice (or somesuch) could cure a terminal ailment. Would that type of commercial puffery go unchallenged or would that just be negative comment in a commercial supplement?”
It would be against the law in the first place. The Govt body that controls Science, Food and Nutrition etc and the Advertising Authority would reprimand the producer/advertiser.
Niall,
Are you suggesting that what we really need to improve the quality and balance in our Property Supplements is some legislation that would force Estate Agents to be forthright and honest in their own puffery?
They do have similar legislation in the UK, perhaps you are on to something. Any chance that any of our Property supplements might look at how that legislation in the UK affected the market there and explore whether there is a case for it here?
“Are you suggesting that what we really need to improve the quality and balance in our Property Supplements is some legislation that would force Estate Agents to be forthright and honest in their own puffery?”
I presume the Advertising Standards Authority would already regulate this. I doubt if new legislation is needed, but probably a complaint has to be made first of all.
[…] written about this before, and will be coming back to this later this week. Tags: Irish-Times, paperround, property, […]
Everything that we have beleived for the last ten years has been shown to be completely untrue. The herd has been fooled.
The price of houses is now decreasing. The price of fuel is increasing. The national private sector pay packet is decreasing. The cost of living (inflation on essentials) is increasing. The amount of traffic is decreasing. The commuter sprawl has been arrested (who wants to spend all that time and money trying to get to a bed in the midlands anyway). The garages are full of secondhand cars that cannot find buyers. The price of second SUVs has completely flopped….
The only constants ; the advertising trying to fool us all, the politicians try to takre credit for their good luck, and blame ‘the credit crisis’ for any economic ‘downturn’. [Actually when the national growth rate is less than the rate of inflation for six months or more, this is technically a recession, not a ‘downturn’].
?