TheJournal.ie

Logo of TheJournal.ie

Established in 2010, TheJournal.ie is Ireland's most popular digital native news service and according to the Reuters Digital News Report, the most second consulted online news service in Ireland (after RTE.ie). TheJournal.ie is owned by Journal Media Ltd, the shareholders of which are Eamonn and Brian Fallon.


The establishment of TheJournal.ie came two years after the Fallons had taken a significant stake in Boards.ie, the largest online community chat forum in Ireland. Despite a significant user base, it is apparent that Boards.ie struggled to attract sufficient advertising to become financially self-sustaining. That the acquisition came just before the full impact of the 2008 launch probably didn’t help in this regard. DML Capital disposed of their Boards.ie stake in 2021. The difficulties with Boards.ie prompted speculation that the Fallons were looking for another outlook to generate traffic to attract advertising and the apparent success of news start-ups like the Huffington Post appeared to suggest one potential means of doing so.


TheJournal.ie’s April 2010 launch came two years after the mobile phone operator 02 first offered iPhones to customers. As smartphone ownership and use spread, TheJournal.ie was well positioned to benefit from the way in which the new handheld technology facilitated new more mobile engagement with all forms of content, including news content. In this regard it’s worth noting that TheJournal.ie remains unusual amongst Irish news media outlets in that its “DNA” emerged from a technology rather than a media background. When TheJournal launched in 2010, five of its 10 staff were journalists: the other five were “technology staff”.


TheJournal.ie’s content is largely focused on hard news (politics etc). There are a number of associated online outlets which address specific content types. The42.ie is exclusively focused on sports while Noteworthy.ie (see below) is focused on investigative work. Journal Media’s strategy appears to be to establish outlets to test the waters for specific subject areas, maintaining those outlets for as long as they generate viable traffic. Previous sub-brands have included TheDailyEdge.ie (focused on entertainment content) and Fora.ie (focused on business and finance).


TheJournal.ie does not operate a paywall and is largely (88%) funded through advertising. Though TheJournal.ie is not owned by Distilled Limited (the company which owns and operates the largest classified online advertising brands in Ireland), the two companies have overlapping ownership. Describing TheJournal.ie’s finances, CEO Adrian Acosta has characterised the relationship with Distilled Media as a “commercial” one “by which we represent them in the advertising business”.


In this regard it is notable that DML Capital’s 2021 Financial Statement records Journal Media Limited as having “processed sales” amounting to €4.8m for Distilled Shared Services Limited, another DML Capital subsidiary. In recent years, however, it has begun to solicit voluntary contributions from its readership although, as of 2023, these account for just 4% of total income for the media outlet.


In 2018, Journal Media received €380,000 from the Google News initiative as seed funding for Noteworthy, a crowd-sourced and crowd-funded investigative/public interest journalism platform. Noteworthy allows users to propose topics which they consider worthy of investigation by The Journal. These proposals which secure sufficient funding from users are then investigated by Journal news staff.


Since 2017, TheJournal also runs what as of 2023 is the only International Fact-Checking Network-verified operation based in the Republic of Ireland. In this capacity they are partners in the Irish hub of the European Commission-funded European Digital Media Observatory (EDMO) from which they receive financial support.
They also receive payments as members of the Facebook Third-Party Fact Checking Programme.

Key Facts

Audience ShareMissing Data
Ownership TypePrivate
Geographic CoverageNational
Content TypeFree
Data Publicly Available
ownership data is easily available from other sources, e. g. public registries etc.

Ownership

Ownership StructureTheJournal.ie’s immediate owner, Journal Media Limited has five shareholders.
DML Capital owns the largest single share with 76%. DML Capital is in turn owned in its entirety by the Fallon Brothers with 50% shareholdings each.
The second largest shareholder in Journal Media Limited is Distilled Media Group Limited. The largest shareholder in the Distilled Media Group Limited is, again, DML Capital with a shareholding of 80.69%. The Fallon Brothers directly own a further 6.98% of the Distilled Media Group Limited.
Added togeher, the Fallon Brothers interests in Journal Media through their direct and indirect ownership of DML Capital and the Distilled Media Group Limited, their total shareholding comes to 88.6%.
Individual Owner
Group / Individual Owner
  • Susan Daly

    Susan Daly studied English and French as an undergraduate before completing a postgraduate qualification in education at University College Cork. Whilst still in college, she began filing freelance sports reports and a column for the then Thomas Crosbie Holdings-owned Evening Echo and Examiner. After graduating in 1998 she left Cork and moved to Dublin when she joined the Irish Daily Star, working as Day News Editor on the Star and subsequently as senior news features writer with the Irish Independent. Susan became Editor of TheJournal.ie publication in 2011 a year after its establishment. She became Managing Editor of all Journal Media publications in 2019. In this role she oversaw the establishment of The Journal’s FactCheck, still Ireland’s only internationally-verified fact-checking outlet and set up the crowdsourced/funded investigative project Noteworthy. Susan sits on the Steering Group of Media Literacy Ireland and the advisory board of FuJo (Institute of Future Media, Democracy and Society) in DCU. She also leads The Journal FactCheck’s participation in the EDMO (European Digital Media Observatory) Ireland hub.
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  • Adrian Acosta

    Adrian Acosta was born and raised in Buenos Aires, Argentin. He studied music at the Centro de Estudios Avanzados en Musica Contemporanea in his home city before coming to Ireland in his 20s. He worked in a variety of event management roles including a stint as director of the St Patrick’s Festival. In 2009 he collaborated with - among others - Brian Fallon on Dreambox, an installation run as part of that year’s Dublin Theatre Festival. Fallon was already considering the establishment of a digital native news service at this point and invited Acosta to become Chief Operating Officer of the new initiative. Acosta remained in that role until 2015 when he became Chief Executive Officer.
    2.5

Media Companies / Groups

Facts

Founding Year2010
Founder
  • Brian and Eamon Fallon
    The brothers were born in 1977 and 1982 respectively and were raised in Rathgar, on the southside of Dublin. They are 50:50 shareholders in DML Capital, the largest shareholder (76%) in Journal Media Limited. The Fallon Brothers are also the main shareholders in Distilled Media Limited which owns a further 13% of Journal media Limited. Both brothers have acted as CEO at the various incarnations of DML Capital. As of 2023, Eamonn Fallon is also the Chief Executive Officer of Distilled Limited.
CEO
  • Adrian Acosta
    Was born and raised in Buenos Aires, Argentin. He studied music at the Centro de Estudios Avanzados en Musica Contemporanea in his home city before coming to Ireland in his 20s. He worked in a variety of event management roles including a stint as director of the St Patrick’s Festival. In 2009 he collaborated with - among others - Brian Fallon on Dreambox, an installation run as part of that year’s Dublin Theatre Festival. Fallon was already considering the establishment of a digital native news service at this point and invited Acosta to become Chief Operating Officer of the new initiative. Acosta remained in that role until 2015 when he became Chief Executive Officer.
Editor-In-Chief
  • Susan Daly
    Studied English and French as an undergraduate before completing a postgraduate qualification in education at University College Cork. Whilst still in college, she began filing freelance sports reports and a column for the then Thomas Crosbie Holdings-owned Evening Echo and Examiner. After graduating in 1998 she left Cork and moved to Dublin when she joined the Irish Daily Star, working as Day News Editor on the Star and subsequently as senior news features writer with the Irish Independent. Susan became Editor of TheJournal.ie publication in 2011 a year after its establishment. She became Managing Editor of all Journal Media publications in 2019. In this role she oversaw the establishment of The Journal’s FactCheck, still Ireland’s only internationally-verified fact-checking outlet and set up the crowdsourced/funded investigative project Noteworthy. Susan sits on the Steering Group of Media Literacy Ireland and the advisory board of FuJo (Institute of Future Media, Democracy and Society) in DCU. She also leads The Journal FactCheck’s participation in the EDMO (European Digital Media Observatory) Ireland hub.
ContactLatin Hall, 4th Floor
8 Golden Lane
Dublin 8
www.thejournal.ie
RevenueMissing Data
Operating ProfitMissing Data
Advertising (in % of total funding)Advertising accounts for 88% of total revenue.
Market ShareMissing Data
Headlines
Meta DataAccessing revenue and profitability is complicated by the fact that the Finance State for Journal Media Limited filed with the Companies Records Office is effectively that of their parent, the DML Capital Unlimited Company. Those statements do not separate out the revenues of Journal Media. That DML Capital’s 2021 Financial Statement record Journal Media Limited as having “processed sales” amounting to €4.8m for Distilled Shared Services Limited, another DML Capital subsidiary is suggestive but it is not entirely clear whether this constitutes a revenue figure.
Sources