Obituary

This article first appeared in Village magazine, October/November 2024 edition

At the time of writing (mid-September 2024) location filming is well under way in the Donegal town of Ballyshannon for Season 2 of “Obituary”, an Irish black comedy television series available on RTÉ at home and Hulu in the USA.

As a freelance journalist watching the new programming announcements last year, I looking forward to watching “Obituary”, since the main character is freelance journalist Elvira Clancy, played by Siobhán Cullen, a new comedy from RTÉ, and I was curious to see how modern freelancing was portrayed on the small screen.

The first season told the story of Elvira, a struggling writer who compiled the obituary column for a local newspaper, the Kilraven Chronicle. In the first episode, she loses her salaried job as an obituary writer and has to adapt to freelancing. Unable to make ends meet, she decides to supplement her income after her editor jokes that she should “start killing people” when she complains about being paid just €200 per item.

Unfortunately, I was unable to suspend disbelief, not at this outrageous premise, but at the idea that a freelance writer would receive as much as €200 for an obituary column. As many of my colleagues can tell you, in real life a freelance gets paid a fraction of that for an obituary, even when the deceased is a nationally known figure. In the real world, a journalist would have to moonlight as a mass murderer to pay the average mortgage.

There is a serious point here. Beneath the quirky darkness, the series does demonstrate the effects of continuing hollowing out of local and national newsrooms. In the USA, some regions are now known as “news deserts”, because of the lack of reliable local reporting. There have been some pieces of good news, such as the promised local democracy and local court reporting grants proposed by Coimisiún na Meán, but it is not yet clear how much of that funding will make its way to the pockets of journalists, and how much will end up in higher dividend payouts to shareholders. Ironically the Coimisiún itself part-funded “Obituary” (along with RTÉ, Screen Ireland and the WRAP Fund, which aims to support screen production in the west of Ireland.

Recent UK figures give an idea of the extent of the crisis in local journalism. An ABC audit of regional daily newspapers showed print circulation down 17% year-on-year in the first half of 2024. A year earlier in 2023, the equivalent figure was a fall of 21%. And the year before that, print circulation fell by 16%.

Gains in digital circulation can make up for some of those losses, and in some cases, overall circulation can remain stable or even increase. But the harsh truth is, digital sales are often less valuable than print, both in terms of how much readers will pay, and in the value of advertising they attract.

News media find themselves caught in a vicious circle. Even if they can hold or increase digital readership, paper sales are valuable, bringing in lucrative display adverts. But readers -mostly younger- are leaving, or never get a paper buying habit in the first place. Audiences grow older, more conservative. Desperate to hold on to any remaining audience, newspapers editors double down on conservatism for that audience, and in the process repel younger readers.

But what if there was another way of of the death spiral newspapers find themselves in, chasing ever declining older markets?

Four years ago the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation, NRK, set out to restructure its climate change reporting, investing in deeper, more detailed reporting.

The gamble paid off, and climate change coverage from the broadcaster now consistently outperforms the rest of the newsroom’s reporting. One story, about the impact of climate change on oceans, was viewed nearly a million times — in a country of about 5.5 million people. Conventional wisdom is that audiences are not interested in abstract topics like climate change, but the NRK experience suggests this myth has no base in reality.

“The fact is, that if you make a good climate story, people will want to read it,” said Hans Cosson-Eide, editor-in-chief of climate and technology news when interviewed by the US-based Nieman Journalism Lab.

Many potential news audiences appear to be in the same position as voters in the ongoing American elections, tired of the same old debate they heard before between ageing “boomers”, but ready to be enthused by fresher reporting that speaks to younger audiences (and “younger”, in this case, means anyone under 60!).

Newspapers could do worse than study the Harris-Walz campaign, and ask what topics they could take a fresh approach to in order to spark the same enthusiasm.

Otherwise, the obituaries they are writing will be for their own industry.