The coffee table of Paul Henderson’s corner office on Haddington Road is strewn with newspapers from tabloids to the paper of record. It is a reminder of what remains a core part of DMG Media Ireland, as it builds its growing digital business. This includes popular mainstream sites like Mail Online and Evoke.ie as well as smart niche ones like OneFabDay.com and BizPlus, the online site of its business-to-business magazine Business Plus. Adjacent to Henderson’s office is its multi-media studio, while a short walk away is a busy newsroom of journalists feeding into the next day’s Irish Daily Mail and its other titles.

I am meeting Henderson to ask him about signing up Ryan Tubridy as a new star columnist for his best-selling title the Irish Mail on Sunday. But inevitably our conversation ranges beyond that to the outlook for Irish media in 2024 and to a series of separate legal actions being taken by Sinn Féin against various journalists and publishers both in the North and in the Republic. 

Hiring Ryan

Paul Henderson is steeped in Irish journalism. He got his first job from advertising legend Gerry Lennon in The Star in 1989, the year after the popular newspaper launched. 

This experience of being ringside at countless scandals allowed him to assess what was happening with the payments by RTÉ to Ryan Tubridy, and conclude that most of the public didn’t blame the broadcaster for what had occurred. 

A poll by Amárach for DMG reinforced his newspaper instincts as it found that only eight per cent of the public blamed Tubridy for the RTÉ debacle. 

“Ryan is first and foremost an exceptional human being,” Henderson said. “In terms of, for example, what he did during Covid-19 – he kept a lot of people sane and he kept people together. He has done so much fundraising for charity. This is all in addition to doing his job, which he does brilliantly, which is keeping people entertained.” 

Tubridy’s second column will appear in the Irish Mail on Sunday this weekend. The first instalment of his London diary on January 14 was about finding his feet with a new job in London with Virgin radio. It is an engaging read that includes stories about books, historic references and insights into his friendship with fellow broadcaster Chris Evans. It also hints at his own popularity, such as when he describes being surrounded by supportive fellow emigrants at The Irish Post Awards, where “people stopped to say hello and wanted to reassure me that London is a great city”.

Tubridy also featured an anecdote about the late Sinéad O’Connor telling him he had “been mugged by God in a hoodie” during the RTÉ pay scandal. This saw him lose his job after more than two decades as questions were asked about €150,000 he received from the state broadcaster for sponsorship events at which he never performed. Tubridy had offered to repay this money to RTÉ as part of a peace deal that later fell apart.

But back to his contract with DMG. At a time when some politicians and commentators were lacerating Tubridy, Henderson reached out. “I went to him first on the basis of ‘How are you?’ Second, I said: ‘Here’s an idea.’” 

“Ryan has his detractors, but the majority of Irish people are in his camp,” Henderson said. “They miss him and they don’t really care about his finances or his dealing with RTÉ management. They just want him back doing what he does best, which is entertaining them.” 

What was Ryan like when Henderson met him? “It’s not for me to say how he felt,” Henderson replied. “But he is a human being. Was he hurt? That’s for him to say, not for me to say. Is he still brilliant? Is he going to do great things in the UK and for us? Absolutely.”

“If I went back a year pre-all-this would Ryan have had the time or the inclination to do something like this? Probably not. But it works for all of us.” Henderson said he was impressed by Ryan’s contacts book and ability to attract guests. “Ryan can ring up someone like Russell Crowe and arrange to interview him in the middle of a dinner party,” he said. “That is because of the way Ryan has behaved over the years. He builds relationships before, during and after his shows. People genuinely like him.”

Henderson gestured towards the reception area of DMG where in lights are the words: Engaging audience through great content. “What will Ryan do for us?” he asked. “He will create great content. If you do that, then you will have an audience who will pay for it and advertisers prepared to rent that audience by paying it.”

The future of print (and digital)

Ireland’s biggest newspaper group Mediahuis has predicted a “radical digital shift” across its European titles. Mediahuis Ireland’s chief executive Peter Vandermeersch told RTÉ in April: “It is clear that in the 20s – in this decade – many printed newspapers will disappear.”

Henderson doesn’t make any predictions as to when newspapers might disappear. “The newspaper market is declining but we are declining at half the rate of everybody else,” he said. “We are the best performing in the Sunday market and the second best in the daily market. That is because we keep doing what we do. We haven’t lost interest in newspapers. Digital is a huge part of our business but we get up every morning thinking about producing great newspapers, great magazines and great websites.”

For advertisers, Henderson said, the secret was being able to offer them the audience they wanted across multiple titles. “We can reach 3.6 million Irish adults every month across our network,” Henderson said.

“What some of our competitors have done is to take one single brand and try to grow it but we’ve got all these different brands engaging with different people. In the back end, we have the science joining all the data together so if an advertiser comes to us and they want to reach half a million of audience X, we can deliver that.”

DMG, he said, was committed to investing in print and digital, noting both that it owned a printing press in Portadown in Co Armagh, and that it had acquired parenting website Everymum in October 2023. “We are more passionate about what we do than ever,” he said. “If you believe the naysayers’ newspapers are finished, but that’s what they were saying four years ago – and yet here we are with lots of papers.”

“This business has always been hard, and it always will be hard,” he added. “But we have built a thriving print and digital business.”

A threat to democracy

The day before we met last week, Sinn Féin MLA Gerry Kelly saw a defamation action he was taking against the journalist Malachi O’Doherty thrown out in Belfast’s High Court with the master of the court Evan Bell describing his case as “scandalous, frivolous and vexatious.” Henderson said the government had said it was committed to long-awaited defamation reform in the Republic, and that this couldn’t happen soon enough.

“The defamation laws in this country are dangerous for democracy,” he said. “Journalism’s ability to speak truth to power and shine light into dark corners is reduced.” A number of Sinn Féin politicians are suing various Irish publications, journalists and authors.

“The idea of politicians suing media, or journalists suing media… at what point did this become OK to do?” Henderson asked. “Pick up the phone and have a conversation. If we get things wrong, we fix it really quickly. The last place anyone wants to be is in front of a jury.”

The cost of a High Court defamation case for anyone other than a rich person is potentially ruinous if they lose. Henderson said people taking such cases in the High Court, rather than going to the much less costly and quicker Office of the Press Ombudsman or a lower court, should have to prove that they can pay if they lose. “People will always assume that large media organisations can fund a case, and we can, but if we win we should be able to be sure we can get our money back.”

Tubridy will return to RTÉ

Our conversation is winding down when it returns to Ryan Tubridy. Henderson said DMG would be working closely with Tubridy both on his columns and across its different brands if appropriate. “Media is a long game. You have got to have good relationships and think long term and be respectful,” Henderson said. “Ryan has lost his RTÉ family, which was a part of his life since he was in school… But we see Ryan as being part of the DMG family.”

In the longer term, could Tubridy ever return to RTÉ? “RTÉ needs radical change, and to do that needs vision,” Henderson said. “Best of luck to Kevin (Bakhurst, the director general of RTÉ) as he has huge challenges ahead of him. But whoever comes after Kevin will probably have more autonomy, and be leading a different organisation that is fit for purpose in the modern media world. RTÉ has an important role in Ireland and for Irish people globally, but it needs vision.

“Could Ryan Tubridy be part of that vision? Absolutely. If I was running RTÉ, I’d have him back in the morning. Not because I like him, not because of politics, not because of anything else other than he delivers an audience. It is an audience people will either pay for or pay to advertise on. That’s the basics of media. Everything else is window dressing.”

Further reading

Launch, buy, build: Paul Henderson on how DMG Media is thriving in the publishing business