February 16, 2011
By Staff Reporter
By Ray O’Hanlon
Beset by mounting financial losses, the Irish Times is set to reduce its reporting staff in the U.S. and other parts of the globe.
While nothing is yet written in stone, the move will definitely result in one of the paper’s two full-time U.S. correspondents, either New York-based Conor O’Clery or Washington, D.C.-based Patrick Smyth, returning to Dublin.
Smyth, whose mother is the Irish novelist Jennifer Johnston, could be a step closer to the Dublin-bound plane because he has been mentioned as a possible new foreign editor of the daily that has for years offered Irish newspaper buyers the widest coverage of world affairs by native Irish journalists.
The Times has been buckling under the weight of severe financial losses, already sustained and yet to come. This despite an expanding daily circulation in recent years.
Critical attention has been focused in recent months on the management style of the paper, which is run by a trust, and the spending of the paper’s cash reserves on a new state-of-the-art printing plant on the western edge of Dublin, which some industry analysts say will not pay its own way for some years.
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A voluntary redundancy package aimed at all departments in the paper, which employs just over 700 people on a full-time basis, failed to secure the desired number of 250 job cuts.
The result was an announcement by the company late last week that dozens of more jobs would go in every department including editorial.
The editorial restructuring plan literally spans the globe.
The paper will close its full-time Beijing office, its periodically active Moscow bureau, trim its London and Belfast offices, and close its five regional offices in Ireland. Offices in Paris and Berlin are to come under “review.” The Brussels office will remain open.
U.S. coverage, meanwhile, faces a contraction after a remarkable decade in which the Times was at the forefront of covering the Clinton intervention in Northern Ireland, the emerging new business relationship between the U.S. and Ireland, North and South, and the Sept. 11 attack on America.
O’Clery, indeed, brought to the Irish public the most searing account of the World Trade Center disaster as his downtown Manhattan apartment was only yards from the Twin Towers.
O’Clery was the Times’ Washington correspondent for much of the 1990s before he was selected to open the Times Beijing bureau.
He returned to the U.S. a couple of years ago to become the paper’s international business editor based out of New York.
Smyth, formerly the Times’ EU correspondent based in Brussels, described the cuts as “deeply disappointing” and a “setback” for the paper.
“It’s disappointing particularly considering the extra flow of stories from here back to Ireland over the last nine months,” he said. “It’s certainly a blow to be forced to retreat under circumstances like this. But we’ve still a lot going for us.”
Should Smyth be the correspondent that returns to Ireland, the intriguing possibility that the Irish Times might cover the U.S. from a New York, rather than a Washington base, becomes a distinct possibility given O’Clery’s already established Manhattan base.