When Peter Vandermeersch shuffles off this mortal coil, he would like to have his name followed by “journalist” inscribed on his headstone. This is despite the fact that the Belgian is no longer a working journalist.
For just over a year he has been chief executive of Mediahuis Ireland, the country’s largest newspaper group. Rather than chasing stories, Vandermeersch spends his days at board meetings, company think-ins and overseeing redundancy and rebranding programmes.
Mediahuis is about to launch a national advertising campaign for the rebranding of its stable of national and regional titles, in which its 12 local papers, including The Wicklow People and Sligo Champion, have adopted the same green masthead and harp logo of the Irish Independent.
Since March it has been executing a voluntary redundancy programme among its editorial staff, a third round of redundancies since it stumped up €145.6 million in 2019 to buy Independent News & Media (INM), which then had Denis O’Brien as its biggest shareholder. It has reduced its headcount by almost a fifth, from 850 to 700, closed its two printing plants in Newry and Citywest, and whittled down its commercial teams.
Under so-called Project Judo — an acronym for “journalism unique digital operation” — the company has let go 25 editorial employees from a staff of 365 through voluntary redundancy.
The idea, Vandermeersch says, is to ensure that its newspapers are not replicating what the others in the Mediahuis stable are doing. So, for example, if the Irish Independent is writing a profile of Johnny Sexton, the Ireland captain, that same profile will also appear in the Herald and Belfast Telegraph. “We want to make one organisation without making one newsroom,” Vandermeersch says.
The Belgian is a straight-talker. He says that he is “angry” about the recent RTE scandals and also about its “dual mandate” straddling commercial and public service broadcasting, taking business from private players while seeking more government subsidies. “I’m a lover of the public service if they do what they should do — be the public service,” he says.
Vandermeersch is equally “frustrated” with the delays in dealing with the INM data breach, where almost a decade ago the emails of executives and journalists were searched by third parties — a problem Mediahuis inherited. It has reached settlements with Gavin O’Reilly, former chief executive, and Karl Brophy, INM’s director of corporate affairs in 2011-12.
“Bit by bit we have made some settlements with people but the [Office of the Director of Corporate Enforcement] inspectors are still writing their reports.”
His directness can get him into hot water. When he declared on RTE Radio last April that the future of local papers was “endangered”, it prompted a backlash from editors and owners around the country. His belief that Mediahuis would phase out printing newspapers — as it “disinvests” in print — over the next decade was also met with consternation.
Print still accounts for 70 per cent of Mediahuis’s publishing revenues across its six markets — Belgium, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Germany, the UK and Ireland — compared with 30 per cent for digital. In Ireland alone the print figure is higher, at 80 per cent, and Mediahuis sells about 600,000 printed newspapers across the country each week.
“We want it in the next seven years to evolve to 30 per cent print and 70 per cent digital,” Vandermeersch says.
While the company will provide print for as long as readers want it, he still predicts that by 2030 Mediahuis will print only Saturday and Sunday newspapers.
“That may differ in the regions. The Kerryman, for example, is quite resilient for print.” The proof is in the circulation numbers, Vandermeersch says, with the company losing “7, 8, 9 and sometimes 10 per cent of print sales” every year.
Mediahuis last week hit its digital subscribers target for 2023, with 77,000 in-contract subscribers. But it now wants more of those subscribers to pay the full price — many are on cut-price deals. Vandermeersch is coy about revealing churn rates — the number of customers cancelling subscriptions. He told The Sunday Times in 2021 it was then at 22 per cent.
The next big investment will be its website and app, which have been clunky and bogged down with “clickbait” advertising. He says the layouts have already improved and that the papers will soon be redesigned in line with a company-wide digital website and app overhaul.
Born and raised in Bruges, he remembers the moment he wanted to become a journalist. “It was when the movie All the President’s Men came out, and I went three times to see that movie in one week. I wanted to bring down presidents.”
After completing a history degree at Ghent University and abandoning a PhD on 16th-century history, he found freelance work writing book reviews for De Standaard, a Flemish daily newspaper, which would later become Mediahuis.
He spent four years as a correspondent in Paris before moving to New York. In 1999, at the age of 37, he was appointed editor of De Standaard and stayed there for 11 years. In 2010 he left Mediahuis to become editor-in-chief at NRC, a Dutch group of newspapers. Five years later Mediahuis bought NRC. The running joke, he says, is that the company “paid millions to get me back”. He has yet to take down any presidents, yet stories about clerical abuse in Belgium and the Netherlands were broken under Vandermeersch’s reign at NRC and De Standaard. “I was a very decent feature writer and decent interviewer. I have never been an investigative journalist.”
When it became clear in 2019 that Mediahuis was buying INM, it made sense that he would play some role in the company. His wife, Francine Cunningham, is Irish, a former journalist turned lawyer at the international law firm Bird & Bird.
The purchase of INM had a dramatic impact on Mediahuis. “The company was Dutch-speaking, the culture was Flemish-Dutch and suddenly we came to Ireland. Meetings are now held in English. We became a much more international company and have since acquired newspapers in Germany and Luxembourg.”
He says he has “no idea” if Mediahuis is in the running to buy the Telegraph Media group in Britain. In Ireland, the group has been acquisitive, if in small bites. Reach, its wholesale arm, provides logistics services. Last month it added Paramount Packaging, a Wicklow-based distributor of food, pharmaceutical, luxury and industrial packaging, to its armoury. Vandermeersch says shoring up its wholesale business will help prolong the life of its publishing titles.
Last year it bought Carzone, a classifieds business, from the UK-based Auto Trader Group for €30 million. That followed the 2020 acquisition of Cartell.ie, the motoring data company. In November last year it bought the online comparison site Switcher.ie. Other classified site acquisitions are likely in the hopper. Vandermeersch also sees Mediahuis expanding into the area of advice sites such as gardening or cooking. “In ten years’ time we will be a broader company but at the core will be good journalism,” he says.
It won’t be buying more local newspapers but it is interested in acquiring radio stations, while also expanding its slate of podcasts and figuring out how to make them profitable. “If you want radio stations they have to be for sale, and at the moment they are not,” he says.
While he appreciates the government decision to eliminate VAT for newspapers, he says it must do more. “We are not on a level playing field and that makes me sad and angry because the minister of media [Catherine Martin] should realise that she is not the minister of RTE.”
Vandermeersch sees artificial intelligence as an opportunity rather than a threat. The parent company has drawn up an editorial charter to show its journalists when they can use AI. In Ireland, it has been carrying out trial runs where headlines are created by AI. “We are still very cautious and always it needs human oversight,” Vandermeersch says. “Our journalists need to realise if a machine can do it better then let the machine do . . . the stupid work, and then they should focus on producing original journalism.”
The company has changed the terms and conditions on its website so that Microsoft, Google and other AI operators can “scrape” their sites only for search but cannot use the content to create generative AI. Along with Deirdre Veldon of The Irish Times and Kevin Bakhurst of RTE, Vandermeersch wrote to Google and Microsoft to ask them to sit down and discuss article 15, which provides legal protection to press publications in the area of online use or reuse. “The big platforms should reward the journalistic organisations in a decent way. The money they came up with until now is peanuts.”
In the drive to digital, Vandermeersch says it should not be a race to the bottom to produce clickbait articles. While admitting newspapers make mistakes, he points to the Russell Brand story in last week’s Sunday Times as the “kind of journalism we all should do more”.
“We ourselves have to produce better journalism, more unique journalism, investigative journalism. Too many of the newspapers are doing what everyone else is doing. It’s not about page views it’s about value of journalism.”
The life of Peter Vandermeersch
Vital statistics
Age: 62
Lives: Greystones, Co Wicklow
Family: married to Francine, with son Sebastian, 24, and has two children from a previous marriage — Maarten, 42, and Lotte, 39. Grandfather to four
Education: degree in history from Ghent University in Flanders and studied public policy at Harvard Kennedy School in Cambridge, Massachusetts
Favourite film: Citizen Kane
Favourite recent book: Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland by Patrick Radden Keefe
Working day
It is full. A classic work day is impossible for me because I am here or in Antwerp or in Kerry or around the country. When I am in the office, I get up by 6am and try to get to the office by 7.30am. The first hour in the office is quiet, I read the papers. I stay here until 6.30pm or 7pm.
Downtime
Travelling around Ireland on my motorbike and taking photographs. I am addicted to photography and always have my Leica camera with me to take pictures of random people around Dublin. I have a plan to publish a book one day.
