Piaras Kelly PR - Public Relations in Ireland

She looks really well…I wonder whether she’s going out with someone or seeing someone…But I don’t ask because I wouldn’t give her, like, the satisfaction of letting her think I give a s*** one way or the other - Ross O’Carroll-Kelly

The fact that most Sunday Tribune readers buy it because of the Ross O’Carroll-Kelly column was a throwaway comment from Noirin Hegarty, the paper’s editor, at the PRII talk on Tuesday evening on ‘The changing face of print journalism.‘

Hegarty pointed out that the Tribune is a paper catering for a slightly younger audience and aims at having something for everyone. While she concedes that the Ross O’Carroll-Kelly column, Ireland’s equivalent of the Bridget Jones Diary in terms of popularity, is the paper’s unique selling point for its younger readers, she pointed out that it offered good lifestyle features for women and quality sections for sport and business for men.

It makes you wonder why they dropped the blogosphere column then, it’s not like the Tribune can afford to lose any readers. Bernie Goldbach makes a similar point in a recent post (see last paragraph), when he says that an Irish broadsheet offering Irish bloggers a weekly column space would make for interesting reading.

The blogosphere column did just that for me. It made a direct connection, covering something that I was specifically interested in that no-one else covered. The Ross O’Caroll Kelly column is growing stale for me. Having gone to a rugby-playing, private school, I could directly relate to it, but that sense of engagement has worn off. I guess it’s back to the Sunday Times and Sunday Business Post for me.

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