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Star on the rise but ‘market in for tough time’
Sunday, August 31, 2008
Irish Daily Star managing director Paul Cooke is pleased with the tabloid’s sales, but is not resting on his laurels, writes Catherine O’Mahony.

An accountant by t raining, Paul Cooke doesn’t like to waste money. ‘‘We’re interested in making a few bob,” is how he describes the core philosophy behind Ireland’s best-selling daily tabloid newspaper, Irish Daily Star, and its stable-mate, the relatively new Irish Daily Star Sunday.

In this regard, Cooke is doing better than many in the newspaper business at present. Independent Star, the company which publishes the Star newspapers, reported a 25 per cent increase in operating profits in 2007 to €6.5million.

Profits for the company have increased by a cumulative 151 per cent since 2004.The firm is a joint venture between Independent News & Media and the Express Newspapers group, although local management is wholly in charge on a day-to-day basis.

A fortnight ago, a 3 per cent sales growth for the paper for the first half of 2008 was reported, in a broadly negative market.

It is averaging sales of 109,413 a day, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations (ABC), at the apparent expense of rivals such as the Irish Sun - which experienced a decline in sales to 103,673.

The Irish Daily Mirror was static at 70,558 and the mid-market Irish Daily Mail - which recently poached the Star’s sales director, Paul Henderson - was down 6 per cent at 59,443.

Irish Daily Star Sunday is doing less well than the daily, with sales down 2 per cent at 61,367 for the first half of the year. The paper was launched five years ago and - while it’s the third best-selling tabloid on Sundays, after the Sunday World and the News of the World - it’s still losing money.

Cooke insisted he was pleased with his newspaper’s performance and said it was now very close to the scale it needed to turn a profit.

‘‘From a standing start, it’s still very good going,” he said. He noted that the Sunday market was more competitive than the daily one, given the Sunday World’s dominance (it sells close to 300,000 copies a week).

To raise sales, Cooke has been investing in the Star’s Sunday title. Last May, the company launched a glossy magazine aimed at men called Amen. This launch was too late to have an impact on the latest ABC figures.

Men’s magazines haven’t been big sellers in Ireland, so it was an unusual tactic for any newspaper to adopt (the only vaguely comparable effort is the British Observer’s Sports Monthly magazine). But the Star’s readers are mostly men (by a 54 per cent to 46 per cent margin) and, as Cooke said, nobody else was bothering to target them.

The magazine launch was informed by research, he said, with both male and female focus groups brought in to talk about what interested them and look at dummy copies of the magazine.

The result is a pretty civilised approach to Amen’s core target market of 20to 34year-old males, with cover subjects including Barack Obama and Shane MacGowan, alongside the more predictable choice of Liverpool star Fernando Torres.

‘‘Thoughtful might be going too far, but there is no nipple count’’, said Cooke. ‘‘There aren’t even any women on any covers. If people want that, they can go and buy Zoo or whatever.”

Cooke said he was confident the new magazine would help lift sales on Sundays over time. ‘‘It’s not about seeing a TV ad one week, it’s about getting something extra, something that brings you back.”

The Irish Daily Star features Star Chic, a magazine for women, on Saturdays that has helped secure up to 10 per cent lift in weekend sales, he said.

‘‘Magazines give us something that we can promote, and that’s really important,” said Cooke. ‘‘It’s all very well offering a CD and getting 100,000 sales, but what about the next week? You’ll be back at 60,000.With the magazines we don’t just say, ‘Your newspaper now has a magazine’.

We say, ‘Here’s a new magazine and guess what? It comes free with the newspaper’.” Cooke said the Star’s editorial approach to the Sunday paper had changed since the launch.

‘‘We started out very much thinking of it as a seventh-day edition of the Star, but it’s not that. People want something different from Sunday papers - they want a good reflective read. I think we started off assuming that people would never want to read about things that had been reported during the week, but they do.”

Cooke said he was also starting to change his mind about another compelling issue, the popularity of online media.

The Irish Daily Star has no online edition, and Cooke does not appear entirely convinced that it needs one. But he said the newspaper would develop some kind of online presence soon.

‘‘It will happen, we’re talking about it, but I’m not sure when,” he said. ‘‘But I’m not putting the front page of the Irish Daily Star online, or the back page either. There are other things we can do.”

Cooke’s scepticism is due to a worry over the commercial appeal of what he said would be a very expensive exercise. The Irish Times’ recently revamped website looks ‘‘fantastic’’, he said. ‘‘But who’s making money online? Google?”

In general, Cooke believes there is a competitive threat facing the press sector from online media.

‘‘I think the market is in for some tough times,” he said.

‘‘I’m a great believer that we, as a sector, ought to be doing a lot more to promote ourselves, to tell people about the stickiness of newspapers, the loyalty they inspire. Papers are resilient. In our case,109,000 people stop their cars every day, go into a shop and buy our paper. What other medium gets that?”

He said the economic downturn ought to be seen as an opportunity for papers to win greater revenue share from media outlets like TV channels, which were expensive and not necessarily effective.

Cooke said the Star group had seen no significant impact on its advertising revenues from the economic downturn, although he conceded that making the sales had been harder than usual this year. He noted that the Star had limited classified advertising, so its exposure wasn’t as large as some papers.

‘‘But I don’t know how it’s going to go. Nobody does. We don’t know if we’ve seen the worst of it already or not.”

More broadly, Cooke said he took a relatively relaxed view of his competition, although he noted that distinction between tabloid press and broadsheets was getting more blurry at times. Dublin freesheets Metro and Herald AM had arrived without making any impact on sales, he noted.

‘‘I believe in investing in the product. When we heard the freesheets were coming, we increased the cover price by close to 10 per cent (to €1.30, the price is now €1.35). Then we did a bit of redesign and brought in some new columnists (like Podge and Rodge). But our Dublin sales have performed in line with the rest of the market.”

The Star’s Irishness sets it apart from the rest of the market, Cooke said, pointing out the cover of last Wednesday’s edition, which showed Olympic boxer Kenny Egan arriving back to his Dublin home in an open-top bus carrying the Star’s logo (this detail was carefully removed from all the other papers).

‘‘That kind of thing takes some hard work,” he said, ‘‘but it’s worth it.”

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