As an 80-page tabloid to be published every Saturday, Village is being pitched as an additional purchase for readers of The Irish Times and The Guardian. If one in seven of the 140,000 who buy The Irish Times every Saturday also buy the new publication, it can apparently break even. It’s a modest goal and doubtless achievable, given the fan base accumulated by the magazine’s editor, who previously published Magill and edited the Sunday Tribune at its peak.
The bigger question about Village is whether it can make a significant impact on the overcrowded and underwhelming Irish media. To do this it will not only have to discover some hot new talent that has been unwilling or unable to gain entry to the media already, but also will have to unearth stories that nobody else is covering.
Anybody who has had to hire journalists or commission copy in Dublin will certainly sympathise with the idea that neophytes represent a better journalistic bet than much of the experienced talent already available.
Journalistic talent in Dublin seems to come in waves, in a pattern that has remained impervious to the doings of the graduate journalism courses. The early 1980s saw one wave, the early 1990s another, although we are still waiting for the next one.
For many, the products of the journalism courses represent the worst of both worlds: they have little experience but in many cases they have habits that can prove counterproductive.
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Newbies from elsewhere, even though they have to learn the scurvy trade from scratch, at least don’t have to shed bad journalistic habits. They tend to be more interesting, too, and in addition they tend to be free of what Village’s editor, in a previous position, used to describe to his staff as the cancer in Irish journalism, namely the desire to get paid more than the average industrial wage.
But even if stuffed with new talent, the publication will have to break stories and pursue investigations, as opposed to working up a head of steam in opinion pieces each week — it doesn’t take a clairvoyant to see the latter in Village’s future.
Magill and the Tribune made their reputations with investigations, but their costly investigative strands wilted as budgets were squeezed.
Even if the budgets are put in place for investigations, the scope of journalism to make power accountable in Ireland has been revealed, since the heyday of Magill and the Tribune, to be puny compared with the power exercised by tribunals.
The role of the serious media has shifted significantly as a result, to that of tribunal exegesis and watchdog. It’s the sort of thing that can make for good radio, as Village’s editor has already proved.
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Whether it can make for a compelling Saturday read remains to be seen.