Independent House on Talbot Street now feels more like a technology company, with swish furniture and bright screens highlighting breaking stories, compared to its origins as Ireland’s biggest newspaper publisher.

Now owned by European media group Mediahuis, the paint-peeling gritty feeling that pervaded the building in the controversy-strewn Leslie Buckley era is no longer there. 

That’s not to say Mediahuis isn’t facing its challenges. Like all media around the world, it is under pressure to cut costs and shift resources from old to new ways of doing things. 

In January, it announced plans to cut 10 per cent of its workforce as the business shifts from print to digital. I’m meeting Peter Vandermeersch, the chief executive of Mediahuis Ireland, to discuss its podcast strategy, one of the most interesting new developments in Irish media.

In Crime World, a podcast which garners more than one million streams a month, Mediahuis has created a break-out hit with presenter Nicola Tallant. Tallant discussed the leveraging of Crime World‘s audience into a business in our interview yesterday. “Once Mediahuis are happy with the success I bring them, and I’m happy with nobody interfering with me, then it’s all good,” she told me. The Indo Daily is less big, but it won the best podcast award at the European Digital Media Awards last year. 

Adrian Weckler’s the Big Tech Show is more niche but it understands its audience intimately and has sponsors fighting to get onto it. Mediahuis has other podcasts too, and it is about to make a big investment in a new daily sports show. All in, the group has set itself a commercial target of €1 million in revenue from Irish podcasts this year. But how is it going to do it?

The company was in disarray

One of the final projects Peter Vandermeersch worked on before leaving his job as editor-in-chief of NRC Handelsblad, the paper of record in the Netherlands, in 2019 was launching a new daily podcast drawing together the best from its many journalists in audio formats.

Last November, that podcast, called NRC Vandaag, won the best daily podcast at the Dutch Podcast Awards, beating radio stations and other more established broadcasters. 

When Mediahuis acquired what was then called Independent News & Media, it bought a company in disarray. It had talented journalists and well-established titles but it had ploughed into digital with little thought for monetisation, not to mention the internal hacking and various other scandals. 

Starting a podcast vertical was not on Vandermeersch’s immediate to-do list. “To be honest, my first goal was to make a better website and build a paywall around that website,” he said. “We had to make sure the website reflected our independent journalism because at that moment, our website was really chasing clicks. It didn’t reflect the quality of journalism we had in our print.”

Vandermeersch inherited an embryonic podcast business that notably included one from health and fitness expert Karl Henry, which continues today. “To be fair, it was the commercial side of this business which was first interested in podcasts,” Vandermeersch said. “But we didn’t have Crime World, The Indo Daily then. Adrian Weckler might have started his podcast already.  But it was basically individual initiatives.”  

“I came from NRC Handelsblad in Amsterdam where before I left we started the Daily of NRC, which basically was a complete copy of the Daily of The New York Times.”  

“At NRC, we basically were two or three years ahead of where it was here.” The experience meant he was supportive when Sunday World crime journalist Nicola Tallant and her editor Brian Farrell came to him to pitch the idea of a podcast that would become Crime World. 

“It really quickly evolved into Nicola, and I have to say without much structure, Nicola on her own, without a producer, and while she was still developing her regular crime work,” he said. “Very quickly it was a success, and very popular. Nicola had something, and then we built a little structure with a producer and, using this as an example, we further developed our other podcasts.”

A new daily sports podcast within months

Mediahuis Ireland is working on a new daily sport podcast. It will be a serious challenger to existing players: state-owned RTÉ, Bauer-backed Off the Ball, and independently owned Second Captains. 

In what timeframe will this happen? “We would like to launch a daily sportscast in the next couple of months.” 

The market for sports content is big, so it doesn’t mean one will cancel out the other, but across its titles, Mediahuis has a good sports team who are regular guests elsewhere. Adding sports podcasts is a logical next step for Mediahuis, which now has a portfolio of podcasts covering everything from politics to health and well-being.

But can it make money from podcasts? “The strategy in general from the Mediahuis Group is we’re storytellers. For many, many years we did it in print or digital.  But we can tell these stories also in podcast form, in audio form,” Vandermeersch said. 

“Why shouldn’t we use the talents we have here, not only for print and digital but also in the audio field?” Vandermeersch said. “We want to build a vertical in which we say, you can come to us for print or for digital, or you can come to us for audio. We see that the people listening to our podcasts are fundamentally younger than the people reading our newspapers or websites,” Vandermeersch said.  

“For us, it’s very important to reach these younger people and a side-effect can be that we bring them to digital or they take a subscription. What’s important, obviously, is in one way or another, in the middle to long term, we have to monetise our podcasts,” he said. Mediahuis has 20 people working full-time on podcasts, which can tap into its hundreds of journalists and regular contributors. Vandermeersch said he expected to hire more. 

“This is the first year where we really see in our budgets very serious money coming from podcast sponsorship,” he said.

Will you make money in 2024? “This year the whole podcast business won’t break even but we’re not that far from it,” Vandermeersch replied. 

Convincing the world of advertising

“The first thing we have to do is reach people. If people are interested, there is a place for advertising. We have had to convince the advertising world that there is something really interesting happening in this business in podcasts. All in, Mediahuis is delivering an audience of more than half a million people a week listening to one or more of its podcasts. Crime World is bigger than all the others combined, so it is the flagship. The various Indo podcasts combined are reaching more than 200,000 people, a significant audience. 

Mediahuis is also building its podcasts stable in Northern Ireland. “In the North, we have another 30,000 to 40,000 with the Belfast Telegraph,” Vandermeersch said. “If you put it all together, we have at least half a million starts a week for Mediahuis podcasts and sometimes more, with 75 per cent of them listening for half an hour. It’s almost an untapped big audience for advertisers.”  

Most of the presenters and key guests on Mediahuis podcasts also work as journalists in the broader group, both in print and online. It is hard, therefore, to strip out the exact cost to Mediahuis of producing podcasts as it is worked into the group’s workflow. 

“This year, we will be quite close to break even. The revenue target for this year would be around a million,” Vandermeersch said. How much was it last year? “We were probably at €300,000 so it is growing very fast. We are learning, and we can see how in Europe and definitely in the Netherlands they are still two or three years ahead of us. We don’t want to make radio, we want to make audio,” Vandermeersch said. 

Commercial radio stations like Newstalk as well as state-funded RTÉ are dependent on Mediahuis journalists to comment on the biggest stories of the day. Does this make sense? “To be honest, I have always been a bit frustrated hearing Nicola Tallant, Fionnán Sheahan and Kevin Doyle on RTÉ or on Newstalk telling about their experiences and sharing their insights.  And they still can do it.  But finally, we can start to monetise that a little bit ourselves.” 

Listeners’ age profile is different

Does it make sense for a station like RTÉ, which receives many millions in taxpayer funding, to be able to tap into a Mediahuis journalist’s expertise for a small fee paid to the journalist? “That’s it,” Vandermeersch said. “That’s the way, and obviously people will say we get a bit of publicity but as a journalist in Belgium and the Netherlands I was the whole time on the radio giving all my expertise to another medium.” 

“Now we are trying to keep our expertise in the Indo or the Sunday World. The nice thing is that the Sunday World, thanks to Nicola, is not only a print paper anymore or a website. It’s starting to be Crime World and Crime World as a brand is maybe as strong for some people as the Sunday World.” 

Vandermeersch said the age profile of listeners to its podcasts was different. “For the newspaper, our main group would be fifty-plus but for the podcast, it’s 34-45,” he said. “That’s the main age group we are reaching in all our podcasts.” 

For the first couple of years, Crime World carried almost no advertising, despite it gaining traction with the public. More than a year ago, however, it started to win some. 

Why did it not happen sooner? “Basically because advertisers were not interested, or we were not good enough selling ads. You have to realise our people here have been selling newspapers and websites for a long time, so we had to think about how do we sell this? And we needed volume.” 

With Mediahuis’s Irish podcasts attracting significantly more than 500,000 listens a week, it now has scale. “It is a serious business,” Vandermeersch said. Crime World is on a long trial being sold on the Acast platform. “We wanted to see if they can make more money out of it, while we are monetising The Indo Daily ourselves,” Vandermeersch explained. “After six or 12 months on Acast, we can make an evaluation because it is also a game of volumes. For a while, we didn’t have the volume, and we didn’t know very well how to sell it. There are still big discussions about ads – we have pre-rolls, but do you have a mid-roll?” 

Vandermeersch said podcast presenters often mention advertisers during their shows, but he was conscious that Mediahuis employed journalists. “For us, it’s new,” he said. “It’s a bit – OK, we do a test with Sky for a crime programme with Nicola. But do we ask Kevin Doyle in a while to read out ads supporting sponsors? The whole podcast world is shifting. For us four or five years ago, I would have just said never, never, never we should do it. But now I’m starting to see that the world is changing. We should do some things, but also think where does it stop?”

A portal for podcasts in Ireland 

“The good thing is we have very open discussions between Karen Preston, who is head of our advertising, and Cormac Burke who is head of editorial. We are talking about what we should do while keeping our seriousness and reputation for good journalism and independence.”

Would Mediahuis ever buy or invest in other podcast producers in Ireland? “It’s definitely something which we think about sometimes. We think, should we become a podcast platform? Would one and one equal three? That is always the question.” Mediahaus, as a European group, had tried working with other podcast producers but not in Ireland yet. 

“With our new sports podcast, which will be daily, we decided to start an independent podcast ourselves and not buy an existing one and bring it into our stable,” Vandermeersch said. “But you could imagine being a portal for podcasts in Ireland. At this moment we’re at the stage of maybe, maybe yes, but let’s see where it brings us.”

RTÉ can both lean on privately owned media groups for content by interviewing their journalists while being bailed out by the State when it is mismanaged. Is it a fair market?

“I think that definitely, with the RTÉs of this world, we don’t have a level playing field. They have lots of State money and lots of advantages in comparison with us,” Vandermeersch said. “I’m not saying they’re stealing our journalists but they’re using our journalists in a way as we never would allow them to write in their own newspapers, and yet we allow them to feature in RTÉ programmes. They really add their expertise, which RTÉ apparently doesn’t want to pay for.” 

“Before, it was easier. RTÉ was sound and it was television, and we were writing. But now we’ve converged into the same space. These conflicts will, at a certain moment, become clearer and we have to start to develop a view on that. At this moment, we’re saying let’s further develop and that instead of 500,000 starts, let’s hope to have 5 million starts in the foreseeable future.”  

“At a certain moment, we will have to sit down with our people and say: How will we handle this? How will we make sure that your expertise is used for our platform but that you still feel happy as a person appearing on radio stations? But we’re not naïve enough to help in making a competitor bigger than they already are.”

Audio is complementary to Mediahaus

Long-form audio journalism is also part of the plan. Vandermeersch cited Kevin Doyle’s series called I’m Not Here to Hurt You, about the polite bank robber John O’Hegarty, as an example of this. Vandermeersch said Mediahuis had considered translating the series for a Belgian audience but didn’t do it in the end. He believes that AI translation is coming, which would make it easy for podcasts made anywhere to be translated easily for other markets. He said Mediahuis as a group made really strong podcasts, like one on the so-called beast of Belgium, child killer Marc Dutroux. If the translation issue could be resolved, they could be listened to across the group’s markets. “We will start to develop these things, but it’s early days to do this.”

In a state auction, Mediahuis won two of nine radio frequencies made available in the Netherlands. Would Mediahuis ever buy a radio station like, say, Newstalk? 

“We really see audio in general as very complementary for Mediahuis. So, if there were possibilities to buy radio in Ireland, we would be interested.” Bauer’s acquisition of Communicorp, he said, meant there were few opportunities to acquire national radio stations, as Mediahuis isn’t interested in small local players. 

“We have to have a certain scale,” he said. “But it’s clear that audio, be it podcast or radio, is really complementary for our business. In a business in which print is diminishing every year, fortunately, digital is growing, audio is growing and video is growing.  It’s clear that audio, video and digital are where we want to invest in, be it in developing it ourselves or buying it.”