By Kristin Snapp

News organizations all over the world are desperately trying to reach younger audiences, but it seems The Irish News has cracked the code.

Thanks to marketing director John Brolly and his staff, The Irish News was the only Irish newspaper with an increased readership last year, and that increase comes from the 16-24 age demographic.

The secret to success? A push on sports coverage, which lured in that demographic, and a media literacy project created with a local university.

Brolly implemented a news literacy project with local schools in Belfast called the Irish News Young News Reader. Students at participating schools sign up for the program, and they and their students receive newspapers for eight weeks. The program targets grades 4-7.

“This project has really taken off because kids are really fascinated by your U.S. president and how he does business,” Brolly said.

The Young News Reader program provides students with a workbook, which defines journalistic terms like “lead” and “angle,” but also it gives students worksheets to complete, correlating with that day’s news.

Brolly says the program has gone over very well among parents, as it is reducing the amount of time their kids are in front of screens.

Since 1891, The family owned Irish News has been situated in the same building in Belfast and has remained one of the top five newspapers in the United Kingdom, usually holding the number one spot. Point Park students heard from eight (I think this number is correct, but check me … It was just so wonderful and complete an effort that it should be recognized.) editors, directors and staff members about their operations and their specific work.

“Our sales over the past six months have been the highest they’ve been in the past five years,” editor Noel Doran said. “We deal with our readers, we take on issues and we deal with challenges every day.”

Of course, being in business for 126 years, the Irish News has its competition. The Belfast Telegraph is the newspaper’s leading competitor, but the Telegraph has lower subscription numbers now, and it shifted its focus from hard news to show business and celebrity entertainment in an effort to entice readers.

The NI leading newspaper employs a staff of 50 journalists, although Doran feels there is room for more.

“It could be better, but it could be worse. It’s enough to keep the show on the road,” Doran said. “It’s a smaller staff, so the editor does, indeed, have to write stories.”

Being a small-staffed independent newspaper in a small country, The Irish Times faces its fair share of challenges – particularly when it comes to advertising.

Advertising Director Sinead Cavanagh is in charge of selling ads for the newspaper while making sure that there are no ads that disagree with the paper’s stance.

“We, as a newspaper here, have always been an underdog,” Cavanagh said. “We just had to be better to get our piece of the pie, and we’ve had to fight to keep it.”

Cavanagh told students about one advertising client who pulled his ads when the newspaper published a story that was not exactly a shining moment for the advertiser. For five years, Cavanagh has been working with that client in an effort to get them to advertise with The Irish News yet again. She finally succeeded.

Because of that situation, Cavanagh asks reporters to give her a heads up if there are certain kinds of stories being published – like stories on banks crashing. Cavanagh says she understands the necessity to report on instances like that, but she asks for the advance notice so she can be prepared if a client might want to back out due to bad publicity.

While The Irish News might have figured out a way to entice younger audiences, the newspaper is still struggling to make a profit from its online content.

“We’re still trying to convince people to pay online,” digital editor Susan Thompson, who is new to the paper, said. “People seem to think content should be free. We’re trying to remind people that journalism is both costly and valuable.”

Thompson said they have always asked readers to pay for online content.

“Immediately they [The Irish News] knew the benefits of online subscriptions,” she said.

The Irish News only gives online readers five free articles a month.

While The Irish News might be experiencing successes that other newspapers have yet to accomplish, the organization is no stranger to daily challenges and hardships. Thompson said one of the major problems of digital news is creating content that is good enough to charge for.