Only getting around to posting about County Wicklow’s newest newspaper ‘Wicklow News’. Picked it up last week along with the Wicklow People. Having seen the posters plastered all over the place for it, my immediate thought was “uh, oh – they’re in for a fine from the council”. I wasn’t the only one thinking that. The Wicklow People duly picked up on this angle on Wednesday. I thought it odd that they chose to give free advertising to their rival by dedicating a whole page to the possibility that the newspaper could face fines of up to €10,000 for the posters.

According to the Wicklow People “council officials said there had been a huge negative reaction to the posters”. County Wicklow’s Senior Executive Engineer said : “We’ve had the public on, we’ve had auctioneers on because we’re trying to clamp down on auctioneers’ signs. We’ve been trying to tidy up the place.”

Much kudos to Wicklow County Council for clamping down on posters – they are ugly… It makes me wonder why they couldn’t prevent all the massive illegal dumping over the years in our fair county. Maybe the council could now turn it’s attention to the litter blackspots right outside their own front door in Wicklow Town as identified in the last Irish Business Against Litter Survey

Anyway, enough digression. The Wicklow People full page report continued with what I consider to be a very childish piece of journalism. The Wicklow People writer made contact with Daniel Browne, the operations director of Wicklow News, to ask for a comment about the possibility of littering fines. Mr. Browne apparantly made no comment about the litter fines and instead offered the Wicklow People reporter a job. Nothing childish in reporting that, but the method of reporting it was childish. Judge for yourself.

“Evidently in need of a quality reporter, the paper’s operations director offered this reporter a job with the new paper, before he hung up without answering questions about the alleged littering.” The report continued with verbatim quotes of what Mr. Browne said on the phone to the Wicklow People reporter. Too much detail and hardly report worthy.

A bit of competition for the “hearts and minds” of the great newspaper buying public in County Wicklow is a good thing. I found the Wicklow News to be a good read and had a more modern “look and feel”. One thing I noticed with the Wicklow News is that it is definitely following the example of the Dunn Daily Record in the USA. The founder of that newspaper, Hoover Adams, issued a notice to his staff in 1978, expressing his frustration at the lack of focus on local issues in the paper. He said:

“All of us know that the main reason anybody reads a local newspaper is for local names and pictures. That’s the one thing we can do better than anybody else. And that’s the thing our readers can’t get anywhere else.”.

The Dunn Daily Record has the highest readership penetration of any newspaper in the USA. It’s actually 112% ! When asked why the newspaper was so successful, Adams said : “It’s because of three things: Names, names and names”.

Looking at the first issue of Wicklow News, it is absolutely stuffed with names and photos of local people so this may be the not-so-secret secret to what I’m sure will be a successful venture for the River Media Group in Wicklow. In fact, the Wicklow People also seem to be doing a lot more photographs lately, so maybe everyone has read the book “Made to Stick”, where the story of the Dunn Daily Record is told.