The Journal has launched a subscription service - here's why you should join

AFTER 16 YEARS of serving Ireland’s news-loving online audiences, The Journal is launching a subscription service for our readers who want to read more – and read it more often.

This year, we have been investing in news with more depth and more impact. Our investigative team has published projects more frequently than ever before – at least two major investigations every month.

We’ve continued to invest in FactCheck, uniquely among Irish media, hitting our 10th anniversary of fact-checking. And we have launched a stable of new series, features and expert voices to complement the accurate, sharp daily news output our readers have come to expect.

This investment comes at a cost but we’re making an impact. 

This year alone, our work has prompted calls for action at government level on a range of issues from acute mental health services for new mothers, the explosion of data centres, online suicide forums, parking wars in new-build estates, and political handling of the fuel protests.

Resource-heavy work such as podcasts, deep explainers and disinformation debunks have earned our team awards, but more importantly, they add context and clarity to your understanding of what’s happening in Ireland today.

And we’ve gone the extra mile to put reporters on the ground in places where events are happening that impact us here at home. Lebanon, South Africa, and the border of Gaza and Egypt are just some examples of where our journalists travelled in the past 12 months to get the full picture. 

We believe as a newsroom and as an organisation that we can always do more for our readers. As online noise increases, we are cutting a clear channel to the truth with fresh insights and voices you can trust. 

How and why our subscriptions work

That is why we are launching a brand-new subscription service today for the readers who value what we do and visit us often.

The Journal has invested to grow its breadth of coverage, but we need our readers to help us continue expanding. This is not a hard paywall as you may have experienced on other national media.

Anyone with a free account can still read most of what The Journal has to offer. You will never come to our platforms and go away uninformed about what is happening that day.

What we are launching today is a dynamic meter on the number of articles that can be read in a week. That number changes based on inputs such as an individual’s usage; you are more likely to reach that limit if you are one of those readers who enjoys our journalism daily, and you read a lot in that time.

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There will also be a small slice of our total number of articles that are subscriber-only on a given day.

You will see the opening paragraphs of those articles and then have a choice to continue reading with a subscription.

A subscription also means unlimited reading, no interruptions, no limits.

To launch this new way of resourcing our quality journalism, we are offering readers an introductory offer of €1 per month for the first three months of a subscription, with the opportunity then to take up a discounted annual subscription of just €34.99, which is less than €1 per week thereafter.

With your access-all-area account, you will never miss an article or the latest from your favourite writer.

These include some of the additional voices and features you will have been enjoying in the past few months, such as;

• Gavan Reilly‘s Politics by Numbers,
• The Housing Essay analysis series,
• Marion McKeone‘s take on Trump’s America,
• Steve Dempsey‘s tech insights,
• Lise Hand‘s wry eye on current affairs,
• Emer McLysaght‘s Nobody Wants This trends analysis,
• Kelly Earley‘s sharp look at society,
• Darach Ó Séaghdha‘s Calling 353 on Irish identity,
• FactCheck editor Stephen McDermott’s Internet Diaries,
• Valerie Flynn‘s consumer analysis,
• Christina Finn and Jane Matthews‘s Political Winners and Losers of the Week and weekend deepdive analysis,
• The Journal Investigates team’s The FOI Files probes,
• Cormac Fitzgerald’s Rocking the Suburbs,
• Carl Kinsella‘s Hear Me Out debates and Surrealing in the Week,
• Patrick Hanlon’s Feeder’s Digest food column,
• Paddy Comyn‘s Car Clinic and motoring columns,
• QS Shay Lally’s The Big Reno Clinic

This is on top of extra analysis and reporting from our news correspondents and wider team, all resourced by the extra investment we have already committed to being the go-to source for journalism you can trust to make sense of Ireland today.

To this end, we are also introducing new reader experiences so that how you read and view our journalism is more helpful and engaging than ever.

From today, you will see a new navigation and layout on all of our platforms, where we will carefully curate and surface key topics and articles so you always feel up to speed and can dive deeper into important stories.

You will still see breaking stories as they happen too; we know our daily readers love coming to The Journal for a snapshot of the day at any given moment.

You might also notice new AI-generated comment summaries under some articles, to allow you to easily take the temperature of reader reactions to events of the day. We will continue to invest in the reader experience so keep an eye out for more exciting new features in the coming months.

If you don’t already have a free account, register now so you can look around, and we hope you will join the community of readers who have already supported The Journal even before today’s new subscription service.

Every €1 of revenue we receive from our readers is planted back into our newsroom to give you the best possible news service.

We look forward to seeing you as we grow further, with you.