Month: June 2008

  • The Herald goes online

    As of yesterday Ireland’s Evening Herald newspaper has an online presence – over ten years after its sister ‘paper The Irish Independent went online and around thirteen years since The Irish Times did so.

    The Evening Herald holds the somewhat surprising honour of being the first Irish national tabloid newspaper to be fully available online – at present The Star has a website under construction, The Sun just redirects to the British website and The Mirror doesn’t even appear to have a dot-ie domain.

    The website’s design is very similar to that of The Irish Independent and in turn the British Independent; that said it seems far less cluttered and far more image-based – which is a fair reflection of the publication itself.

    Besides the print edition’s articles there are a few added extras on the website. For a start there’s a blog by columnist Emma Blain – although it’s not clear if this is all fresh content or just a copy/paste of the printed columns she writes. Here’s hoping there’ll be more of that (and more blogging from the IN&M stable in general) soon. There’s a classic tabloid “send us your stories” form for people looking to tip off the newspaper. There’s a page dedicated to the newspaper’s latest campaign, something to do with the M50 toll, which seems to use article tags to aggregate relevant copy together in one place. Very nice.

    Finally there’s a somewhat unexpected (Google maps-based) map of Dublin which allows people to search for places in the city.

    If you want to tell them what you think of their new site – or congratulate them on reaching the late 20th century – you can post a comment on this post/article.

    Now let’s hope it’s not too long until the rest of the Irish print media goes fully online – it’s a bit absurd that it has taken this long already.