Mediahuis-owned Irish newspaper The Sunday Independent is launching a Northern Ireland edition, in print and digital. The move is a response to a perceived gap in the market as the Northern Irish dailies do not publish on Sunday, leaving only two tabloids.
The nine-year-old, privately-owned Benelux media group publishes daily newspapers in Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg and Ireland, and owns Dutch and French language TV and radio stations.
Its €146m acquisition of the Irish Independent group in 2018 led to speculation that it would also seek to expand into the UK, beyond Northern Ireland where it already publishes the Belfast Telegraph. It was speculatively linked to the Telegraph Media Group whose family owners had been thought to be considering a sale process – before Covid-19.
In 2020, Mediahuis NV, of Antwerp, had €171.5m EBITDA on revenue of €990.5m. The results underlined the progress at Irish News & Media after years of crisis and under-investment. The introduction of paid-for digital subscriptions for Independent.ie and Belfasttelegraph.co.uk was said to show “the increasing willingness of readers to pay for high-quality online journalism”. Independent.ie had built 30k subscribers in its first nine months. In Belgium and the Netherlands, Mediahuis had increased digital subscriptions by almost 50%.
Mediahuis, which has more than 4,000 employees, pubishes 30 daily news brands reaching 10m print readers and 4.5m web users. It has some 1.7m print and digital subscriptions.
