This case study is part of Resilience Reports, a series from the European Journalism Centre about how news organizations across Europe are adjusting their daily operations and business strategies as a result of the COVID-19 crisis. 

In a nutshell: A neighborhood notice board that enabled over 100 volunteers to offer their services to less fortunate locals and coincided with the number of new monthly subscribers doubling during March and April.

Irish media has been hard hit by the pandemic. In Dublin alone, three local newspapers have had to close since COVID-19 hit and the future of other publications is under threat. But for one subscription-funded publication based in Ireland’s capital city, the last three months have proven to be a watershed moment.

Dublin Inquirer’s neighborhood notice board and community-led “offbeat stories” increased the publication’s online audience. The number of new subscribers it was getting each month doubled during the lockdown. It even received a grant that has allowed it to hire a freelance reporter to cover a brand new beat.

The European Journalism Centre’s Tara Kelly spoke with one of the publication’s co-founders about how it has put readers at the center of its journalism during COVID-19.

What is the Dublin Inquirer?

(Courtesy: Dublin Inquirer)

Dublin Inquirer is a reader-supported local, independent newspaper aiming to provide quality coverage of Ireland’s capital city.

It has a particular focus on local government, housing and homelessness, transport, jobs and working life and arts and culture. Recently, after consulting with readers, it decided to expand its coverage to focus on Ireland’s immigration system and the impact it has on migrants and immigrants living in Dublin.

Founded in 2015, the Dublin Inquirer has three full-time permanent paid staff members and four part-time regular freelancers (three reporters who write a piece once every week or two and a one-day-a-week subeditor). It works with a dozen paid columnists and occasional freelancers, and calls upon two unpaid co-founders, who pitch in with everything from bookkeeping to reporting and editing. Together, the team publishes a weekly online edition and a monthly print edition with articles on local issues and events that other media are not covering.

With €80,000 of revenue over the past year, Dublin Inquirer is entirely reader-funded and carries no advertising. At the time of writing,1,600 subscribers pay between €5 per month (digital only) and €8 a month (print and digital).

Subscribers can also opt to become patrons and pay €10 or  €20 a month. Patrons get the same benefits as subscribers but pay more to help support the publication. Around half of those subscribers are digital-only and half get the print edition delivered to them by post. It also sells around 200 copies per month of the printed edition in a dozen newsstands across Dublin.

According to the Digital News Report Ireland 2019, paying for news is not widespread. Only 12% of readers contribute financially via subscriptions, donations and one-off payments, an increase of just 1% since 2018. Of those who do pay, just over half (51%) only have one subscription. Readers between 25-34 years old are the most likely to pay for online news (19%) while the 55-64 year age group is least likely to do so (7%).

The Dublin Inquirer has what it calls ‘a leaky paywall’ where non-subscribers can access three articles for free per month before paying to access more content. If readers don’t want to subscribe straight away, they can sign up for the weekly newsletter, which has 2,716 subscribers and an open rate of over 40%.

The team also gives away free subscriptions to those who reach out to say they can’t afford it. However, only a few people have taken them up on this offer.

On average, their website receives about 50,000 unique visits and 70,000 pageviews per month. In March, these figures doubled to approximately 100,000 uniques and over 150,000 pageviews. The numbers have returned to normal levels now.

The Inquirer’s readers are almost entirely in Dublin, according to their digital analytics, although 10% live elsewhere in Ireland and 1% live abroad. Analytics for the publication’s Facebook page show that most followers are female (55%) and that the largest cohort of followers is 18- to 34-year-olds, followed by 35- to 44-year-olds. Although the team has never done any demographic research on their readers, they interact with them regularly through collaborative projects, surveys on what they want them to do, real-life meet-ups (before the coronavirus) and Zoom town hall meetups.

How did the Dublin Inquirer handle the COVID-19 crisis?

When COVID-19 first hit Ireland, the team partnered with CivicTech.ie to build and launch a micro-site called Helping Neighbours. The idea came about when co-founder Sam Tranum noticed other people in Dublin trying to organize such volunteer initiatives on Twitter.

Launched on March 18, Helping Neighbours served as an online community notice board, where people and businesses could offer run errands for people self-isolating, do pharmacy pick-ups for elderly locals or make food for health workers.

To help people understand how the directory message board would work, the team listed the existing volunteers and small businesses offering to help their neighbors on the site. Once the site went live, others were able to submit services by filling in an online form. This was then sent to the Dublin Inquirer team for moderation before being posted online.

Readers seeking help could add requests and both volunteers and businesses were encouraged to message these people to arrange whatever they needed. While more than 100 offers of help were listed on the notice board, people were free to contact the volunteers directly so it is unclear how many people benefited from the initiative. There was nothing put in place to ensure people were not scammed but, as far as they know, this didn’t happen.

We’re really pleased to see so many local volunteer groups adding themselves to this directory. If you’re self-isolating, we hope you can find someone here in your neighbourhood to bring you food, prescriptions, or whatever you need from the outside world.https://t.co/vbiIvH4ejo pic.twitter.com/5RIjXtdEtA

— Dublin Inquirer (@DublinInquirer) March 19, 2020

(Screenshot, Facebook)

Brilliant initiative from @DublinInquirer – neighbours helping neighbours. So many ways to get involved! https://t.co/dHrDm0bIih

— Katie Lynch (@KT_J_Lynch) March 25, 2020

In March, the Dublin city council sought to set up their own program and contacted Dublin Inquirer to ask about their experience. The council was supportive of the idea but were concerned about the vetting of volunteers, which Helping Neighbours admittedly did not have.

By April, the board had fizzled out after the Irish government and Volunteer Ireland jointly announced a call for people to support their community using the I-VOL app. This program is police-vetted and has precautions in place when matching volunteers to local organizations responding to COVID-19.

The Helping Neighbours project generated a lot of traffic to Dublin Inquirer’s website and some of those users became paying subscribers. The team believes that the positive reaction to the notice board project may have helped. Dublin Inquirer usually attracts about 30 new net subscribers a month but this doubled during March and April 2020. Such a jump in subscriptions is in step with a wider industry trend — known as the “COVID-19 bump” — that has seen media subscriptions in Europe and the United States increase by 80% and 100% respectively during the pandemic. The publication’s monthly recurring revenue is growing 30% year-on-year.

Alongside the notice board, Dublin Inquirer has continued to report on community news that isn’t covered in other news outlets. This has meant utilizing reporters’ existing contacts among local groups and digging for more offbeat stories, such as how the city’s artists are coping financially during the lockdown and how hostels are keeping COVID-19 rates down for the homeless.

One of the most-read stories on the site since the pandemic looks at how tenants are experiencing mixed reactions from landlords when requesting rent relief. There’s also been coverage about Dublin City Council’s new plans for an extension of cycling infrastructure, larger bus lanes, and a new sustainable drainage system for rainwater.

Print editions of Dublin Inquirer were available in approximately a dozen stockists around the city prior to the pandemic, but these have all closed temporarily due to lockdown restrictions. This has led to some revenue loss. Subscribers were still sent print copies during this time.

Overall, the publication has grown its revenue through subscription increases since the lockdown was put in place.

How has COVID-19 changed the future of Dublin Inquirer?

While they won’t continue the Helping Neighbours scheme after the pandemic, the team is glad they developed the digital infrastructure for such a message board. In the future, the team may use the underlying technology for other announcements or initiatives to help connect with readers.

They believe they made the right decision to try and help locals, even if it was a small number of people that used the notice board. They were also happy to pull back and let others fill that space and provide services for the community.

Many other local newspapers in Dublin were advertising-funded and have closed either temporarily or permanently. For instance, the Dublin Gazette temporarily stopped printing but switched to a digital version, while Dublin People Group declared bankruptcy. Totally Dublin stopped publishing as well. As a result of these developments, the team at Dublin Inquirer feels a responsibility to expand their coverage into new areas.

Following the award of a journalism grant from the European Journalism Centre, the Dublin Inquirer will start covering immigration as a beat. It is currently in the process of hiring a freelancer who will lead the reporting (the deadline for applications is June 16).

The choice for the new beat was decided after a survey was sent to readers asking them for their first, second and third choices. Respondents were then invited to four different Zoom focus group meetings to discuss their preferred topic. Out of the 363 people who voted, immigration received the largest number of first preferences votes (106). A beat on policing and community safety, and food were the other two vote getters, after immigration.

Like many organizations that have been unable to host face-to-face events during the lockdown, the Dublin Inquirer team has switched to online video calls with readers using Zoom. These have gone well and they see themselves hosting more online events in the future. The team would like to mix up their event programme in the future and undertake digital as well as face-to-face meetups.

What have they learned so far?

Lois Kapila, left, and Sam Tranum, Dublin Inquirer co-founders (Courtesy: Dublin Inquirer)

“We’ve learned that many of our readers are really engaged with their community, and want to help each other. It’s been quite heart-warming. It’s also been affirming to have a reader-funded model as things have been relatively stable financially during the pandemic. We’ve learnt that we don’t want to go back to advertising. This is a slower path, but it is the right path. There’s quite a lot of resilience with a subscription model. That is especially the case if we are heading into a recession.”

– Sam Tranum and Lois Kapila , Dublin Inquirer co-founders