As some readers may know already Richard Deleven was fired as Business Editor of the Sunday Tribune for writing an article (update: the article has been pulled) about the difficulty auctioneer Ken McDonald was having selling his own Blackrock house. At the end of the article Richard mentioned that he got the information from a post by A Random Walk and the newsgroup Property Pin. It was unusual to see this in a printed article, as such an attribution is more of a blog convention where a ‘hat tip’ is given to the source of the story. Since Damien revealed the news yesterday Keith of ARW has pulled the relevant post, claiming that he needed some space to think about the significance of what had happened.
So, here we have an interesting (and worrying) meeting, or perhaps clash, of blogs and traditional media. It illustrates a number of issues around the differences between blogs and traditional print media, the relationship between traditional media and their advertisers, and what you can and cannot say, and why you can or cannot say it.
But first some background to the story. Unfortunately, at the moment I can’t quote from Keith’s post, but if we stick with the information from Richard’s article we can get a flavour for the controversy.
“HERE’S a man who can’t be accused of talking down the property market: auctioneer Ken MacDonald of Hooke & MacDonald has had his Blackrock bungalow on the market for 13 months . . . and he hasn’t budged an inch on the 2.4m asking price, so he can’t be accused of adding to the nearly 4% drop in house prices this year.
MacDonald put the 2,100 sq ft home up for auction with Sherry FitzGerald in October 2006 with an AMV of 2.4m, but evidently found no takers at the price. That didn’t stop him listing it for sale by private treaty without a discount, though.”
As the recently published TSB/ESRI survey indicated, house prices have been dropping for the last six months and have come down almost 4% since this time last year. This is not a controversial point. In fact, some blogs which have been tracking house prices for most of the year (until they were blocked) would say that the drop is higher, but that’s not important. It’s very easy to show that house prices are dropping significantly countrywide.
As we know there is much talk about ‘sentiment’ in the property market and about its curious power over potential buyers. Until very recently the Sunday Independent, following Bertie’s lead, went into overdrive attacking those who are supposedly ‘talking down’ the economy - as if pointing out the weaknesses of relying so markedly on a property market bubble has the ability to affect the economy’s performance. Similarly, with the housing market Auctioneers and Estate Agents are always trying to project a positive sentiment in the housing market, which requires them to use modern spin techniques which are always derived from traditional forms of lying. When one considers the nonsense talked about Stamp Duty before the election we have a perfect case in point. Stamp Duty was a huge issue coming up to polling day, but it affected a tiny proportion of the electorate. Now that it has been reduced, property price are really starting to tumble, completely negating the argument made before the election.
Despite this we are still hearing crap like this from Estate Agents:
“Peter Wyse, Of Wyse Estate Agents — whose company has three offices in the Dublin area — is among those who have let staff go as a result of the slowdown. Speaking to the Sunday Independent, Mr Wyse said: “This penal system of stamp duty is overtly anti-family. It is like a giant condom preventing people from having more children, because they can’t afford to trade up to a bigger house. Stamp duty has created a minor recession on its own.”
(Hat Tip Hugh Green)
So, perhaps it’s not surprising that an auctioneer would want to avoid news getting out that he himself has experienced evidence of the collapse of the housing market. In fact, he’s trying to say the opposite. Richard quotes McDonald telling the Irish Independent last Thursday that “[t]here’s real confidence out there.”
So, was Richard fired for pointing these things out? Unfortunately we have to rely on rumour for this, but it seems that McDonald complained to the Tribune and they sacked him on the back of this. Of course, we should mention that Richard was having trouble at the Tribune anyway. According to the most recent edition of Phoenix he was facing a charge of bullying a colleague, Ken Griffin, and that an independent review process was in train. While this article may have been the ‘straw that broke the camel’s back’ there are still many curious aspects to this case.
Of course, there is also the possibility that McDonald threatened to sue the Tribune for libel. But is that likely? Irish libel laws are very restrictive, so restrictive in fact that any significant publication has to hire solicitors who are experts in media and libel law to vet all articles where there is even a slight whiff of potential libel. Now, while Richard was the business editor it still seems likely that this article was vetted before publication. Today I was talking to someone who used to work as a sub-editor of a well known Business magazine and he said that articles were sent to a solicitor on a regular basis.
Also, Richard’s article is still online. Surely if it was potentially libelous it would have been pulled?
What could have happened is that McDonald, part of the Auctioneers Hooke MacDonald, threatened to pull advertising from the Sunday Tribune. I have no proof of this of course, but if we look at how print media is reliant on advertising we can see how such a thing could have come about.
In the mediabite/Fintan O’Toole interview I quoted before O’Toole discussed the relationship between advertisers and newspapers, specifically in relation to the Irish Times:
“There is no question that almost all of the Irish media for the last 10-15 years has had a crucial economic stake in a rising property market. Because property advertising is very lucrative and is a very important part of what makes the Irish media tick. It’s not that a newspaper like the Irish Times will not publish things that say ‘this is a bubble’. It has published a number of pieces and very authoritative pieces, but in a sense it’s where are those pieces going to appear. How are they related to the broader agenda, in terms of how we understand our society at the moment? So I’m not saying there is an absolute mechanical relationship between certain interests and what appears, but I am saying that the relationship exists. People need to understand this, it is not a council of despair - well you know there is nothing you can do about this. A critical understanding of how the media works is one in which people understand the kind of relationships that are involved and how to read and see that it is not necessarily an objective and accurate reflection of everything that is important to Irish society.”
Now, while it may be the case of that there were other circumstance around the firing of Richard as the Business Editor (and please note that he still has recourse to the labour courts, so I’m not going to fight his battles for him) it would appear that there is a direct relationship between the actions of this newspaper and the sentiments of the advertiser.
But there is a way that this can backfire on the Sunday Tribune. As Fintan O’Toole points out, there is only one reason why advertisers put their ads in these newspapers. It’s to reach their audience, those moneyed ABC1 types.
Here’s O’Toole again:
“…there is a fundamental shaping effect in terms of the self-selecting nature of the audience, the audience has to be an audience that has money to spend. If they don’t have the money spend, then advertisers won’t advertise, if they don’t put the money in then we don’t survive. That’s a simple set of rules; no one tells you these rules when you go into journalism, because they don’t have to. I’ve never been at a meeting where someone says ‘we won’t do that because it doesn’t appeal to rich people’, it’s much more fundamental to that. It’s the air you breathe; it’s the context of which all media, which are funded in whole or in part by advertising, operate. It does have a really important effect on who then is important to be writing for.
If you think I’m being kind of crude saying this then listen to the ads on any of the radio stations when the JNR figures come out of who’s listening to them. They’re not saying ‘we’ve got 1.5 million listeners and Today FM have only got 100,000′, they’re saying we’ve got more listeners in the A B C social categories, we’ve got more listeners in the 17-35 age groups. They are saying very openly: rich people are reading us and young people are listening to us. They are very self-consciously saying some people are more important than other people in terms of who’s consuming their product. That has to have an effect on the nature of things that get done, but in relation to the kind of agenda the paper has, that becomes important.”
I wonder what would happen if someone mad got all self righteous about this and decided to set up a campaign to get people to stop buying the Sunday Tribune until they reinstated Richard as Business Editor. Perhaps nothing would come of it, or perhaps it would turn into a news story which would be picked up with relish by The Sunday Tribune’s competitors, The Sunday Times, The Irish Times, The Sunday Business Post and most significantly the Sunday Independent. What interest would these papers have in supporting such a campaign? Well, if it developed traction it could actually turn those ABC1 readers off the Sunday Tribune, sales would drop, but most significantly, because they would start to lose their, admittedly fairly small, chunk of the ABC1 readership advertisers would stop placing their ads with them. The paper’s revenue would dwindle and they might go out of business.
Puts things in perspective, doesn’t it?
I don’t have time to point out that Richard should never have attributed the information to A Random Walk in the newspaper, especially not without contacting ARW first.
More at Poetbloggs.
A friend of mine, in the advertising business, mentioned that it might (would definitely) be instructive (I seem to be using that word a lot lately) to analyse the size, frequency and placement of property advertising over the last two to three years (could be an interesting college media studies thesis). My obvious guess is that it would show an inverse relation increase against the fall in prices. Certainly it would debunk ‘their’ market confidence rhetoric.
FYI, we will be publishing a new interview with another high profile journalist in the very near future, discussing this issue among other things.
Best, David
Your last point Donagh is very important, but overall I think you’re completely correct. Mind you, perhaps it was a perfect storm situation for RD in terms of a confluence of things arriving more or less at the same time….Anyone notice what seemed to be anti-Stamp Duty ads in the Sunday papers this weekend?
Google cache of the post via politic.ie
http://72.14.253.104/search?q=cache:GP1c_B6gbx8J:www.arandomwalk.com/2007/11/01/things-are-going-grrrreat/+http://www.arandomwalk.com/2007/11/01/things-are-going-grrrreat/&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1&gl=ie&client=firefox-a
Of course at this stage we are only dealing with rumours. We don’t know for definite why Richard got boot, and its unlikely that it will become official soon. However, its inevitable that rumours would circulate and they’ve been known to be true in the past.
Certainly it could be that Richard ‘had it coming’, but even so, looking at A Random Walk’s post now (thanks David, if it’s up on politics.ie it’s already widely available) its entirely based on stuff that is already out there, so it shouldn’t have been a problem. But it’s a PR disaster for The Sunday Tribune. This shouldn’t have been a sackable offence. It just looks like McDonald, who has put pressure on newspapers for saying things he didn’t like before, wanted action and the Trib obliged. If the Irish Times can stand by their man for a very suspect opinion piece why should the Trib give in to a big wig in the property market. At the moment it doesn’t look good, but of course, reality might be different.
To advicate on behalf of BelZBub. Without the facts it is impossible to get a handle on what happened, it seems someone lost his job for attempting to do same in an interesting and critical way. However the piece does suggest some lack of judgement - it reads like there was no effort to contact McDonald in relation to the house. The tone is fairly snide (rightly or wrongly) and could in the extreme be construed to suggest a lack of either a] professional judgement or b] honesty on McDonald’s behalf around his perception and presentation of the state of the market. An editor on a commercial publication with significant reliance on property market advertising should have been able to deliver the facts of the story without running those risks. There is of course a wider issue around the Irish media’s disproprtionate dependance on property advertising and the power that could give the sector, but throw away coverage is not going to do anything to address that.
emmm, advocate
Agree with Londoner. The most compelling reason I can see for giving him the boot, based on the evidence in front of us, is the fact that his article could be interpreted as representing McDonald as dishonest at worst and hapless at best. Do that to one estate agent, you do it to them all, and that hits advertising revenue.
Regarding the allegations that he was a bit difficult to work with/for that are floating about, I have no idea if these are true, but even if they were, it is very difficult to get rid of someone based on that alone. Workplaces are full of such people.
The most likely scenario is a phone call, the content of which contained the words ‘either he goes..’
I was quite surprised at the tone and content of the piece myself. It is rare for a newspaper to so blatantly bite the hand that feeds it.
Whatever the motivation behind it, the effect of Delevan’s sacking will be to discipline journalists even further, making sure they continue to report on the issues as their real paymasters require.
Not that many of them actually need it.
Londoner, I didn’t expand on the point in my post, but I had intended on commenting on how the piece in the Sunday Tribune read like a blog post, and because Richard Deleven is a blogger and an advocate of new media it almost appears that he got confused about what sort of piece he was writing. I suppose I was starting to make reference to this when pointing to the attribution at the end of the piece to A Random Walk. I’m sure many of us have read stuff in the paper that we’re sure came from such and such a blog without any acknowledgement of the fact. In fact, I think Hugh was quoted in the Trib around the Trocaire thing without acknowledgement.
So the tone was that of someone who enjoyed the relative anonymity of a blog taking a crack at a well known figure who Richard should have known could come a knocking at his office door. In fact, the ARW post quoted a piece from the Irish Independent which mentioned that McDonald took exception to a previous piece in the paper.
Perhaps the thing that gave him the confidence to write it in that way was that the original ARW post which linked together information that was already available, along side statements from McDonald talking up the market. Again, I can’t imagine Richard considered McDonald as the enemy, so he wasn’t out to get Auctioneers in general. Rather it was to highlight what he saw as hypocrisy. There is also the unacknowledged fact in blogs, such as ARW, that Ireland’s economic dependence on an over-inflated property market looks like becoming a serious problem, especially in the light of the collapse of similarly hyper-inflated housing markets in the US and elsewhere. This fact, widely discussed elsewhere, hardly figures in newspapers at all, for the good reason that with newspapers reliance on property advertising that it is not in its interest to do so. Again, Richard seemed to forget this fact. What can be said on blogs can’t be said in newspapers and there is a very specific reason for that.
Hugh, you’re exactly right about the other suggested reasons. They shouldn’t factor in this at all. The argument that this was a ‘good excuse’ doesn’t really work either, especially as it could backfire for the Trib. I think its a disciplining measure, but if the reasons are as we imagine, it’s a completely naked one and I’m surprised that the Trib would be willing to reveal how beholden it is to its advertisers without even trying to pretend that it stands by the integrity of its journalists.
meeting, or perhaps clash, of blogs and traditional media.
I’d advise you to give up smoking the mulley-weed. If Richard was fired for this, then it was for the offence of having embaressed a major advertiser, not for anything to do with blogs per se.
My animosity towards the Indo-group execs aside, I’m sorry to see this happen to him. Even the sight of a Waghorne endoresement doesn’t change my sense that he’s calmed down a bit in recent years, and gotten more sense.
Er, that was my point when I said it would appear that there is a direct relationship between the actions of this newspaper and the sentiments of the advertiser.. There is a difference though, isn’t there between blogs and newspapers? Small pesky blogs, such as Random Walk which are semi-anonymous can get away with saying such things because it goes out to a relatively small audience. This is still one of the plus things about blogs, at least from the point of view of the people who write them. Nothing in the Random Walk post was inaccurate, which is probably why Richard felt so confident citing it. But blogs don’t rely on advertising, and Richard must have been aware that it would annoy McDonald. Added to that his tone was very sarcy. A sarciness that one would associate more with blogs where the come-back is less immediate, if it ever comes.
Also, because pesky blogs have no resources to fight heavy hitters like McDonald Richard shouldn’t have brought ARW walk so close to the firing line.
I’m not condoning the actions of the Tribune and certainly I feel that he should have been able to point these things out without getting fired - if its supposed to be a paper that follows proper journalistic standards. I just think that Richard was a little unwise and should have been aware of the fallout for him - he knows the score about newspapers(especially IN&M ones) work in Ireland. I do feel sorry for him, in a way, although I’ve always seriously disliked his politics.
Delevan got was coming. He is a total loose cannon and a bully to boot. As for showing the copy to a lawyer? He was told by his chief sub the piece was dodgy and — FACT — he refused to contact the legal dept about it.
You know Harry, I believe you. Thanks for letting us know the facts and it answers my question about the legal vetting of the piece. I presumed it had been, never having worked in a news room. I assumed he wouldn’t have a choice, but that the decision would be with someone higher up.
As we’ve argued here before, the property market in Ireland has been pumped up and that there has been certain vested interests involved in this, including Government. We’ve also argued that this is definitely not the right thing for the Irish economy in the long term. The ARW post highlighted the same issue. Its a concern that the same points haven’t been made by our national newspapers, but because they are so tied into the economic benefits of property speculation they prefer not to.
The piece was dodgy because it’s tone suggested that McDonald was shifty and a hypocrite. It was written in a way that could, considering Irish defamation laws, been seen as libelous. Not because what was said was inaccurate but because it suggested underhandedness - talking up the housing market while at the same time having personal experience of a downturn.
Clearly Richard was his own worst enemy but still it is really the case that these ‘anomalies’ between what is being said and what is happening can only be pointed out an semi-anonymous blogs, which are too small for the big wigs to notice, and which if they do are easy to dismiss?
very interesting, but I don’t agree with you
Idetrorce