A Tripe + Drisheen update

Here are some things you should know about Ireland's first local news Substack.

Our Tripe + Drisheen pigs are the work of local illustrator Emer Kiely.

A huge welcome to the record-busting number of new readers that have signed up or subscribed in the first quarter of 2023!

We very rarely abuse our mailing list for the purposes of shameless self-promotion but we wanted to give all our new readers a tour of Tripe + Drisheen and welcome them to our growing community: pre-existing readers may know a lot of what’s to come, or they may not.

Here are some things you should know about Tripe + Drisheen, the independent reader-supported news site and newsletter for Cork city and county:

• We were founded by freelance journalist JJ O’Donoghue in February 2021 and he was joined shortly afterwards by current acting editor Ellie O’Byrne: there’s more on our story on our about page, or you can watch this interview with Dave Mac on RedFM:

• We started publishing just one story a week with a focus on long-form features. There’s now an impressive archive of all of these, on a stunning array of topics, on our Long Read tab.

• After we opened up subscriptions to the site and started generating some income, we expanded: you can find an array of articles across our News, Arts+Culture, Lives Less Ordinary and Reviews tabs.

• We publish an article an average of 4-5 days per week at present. Our Friday View slot includes a round-up of stories in brief from city and county, plus a glimpse at a few upcoming events in Out + About, and we’re always happy to include nice arts and community events in this so feel free to let us know about anything exciting going on in your area that you’d like to publicise. Our contact details are included further on.

• If you don’t want to have all our articles emailed to you, you can tailor what arrives in your inbox! There’s a handy guide to doing that here.

• We try to cover stories in interesting ways, often in-depth or from previously unseen angles. A good example of this is our RoboTrees article from back when the infamous structures were being installed on Pana: we were the first people to reach out to the company that makes the trees and try to give the full down-low on the many questions we saw that the public had that were then going unanswered.

  Everything you wanted to know about Cork's new Robo-trees but were afraid to ask

• As we have grown, we really want to work with more journalists, and we pay a fair and transparent rate to everyone who writes for us. Although Ellie and JJ are still the main contributors, you can also find work from Noel Sweeney and Kilian McCann, and occasional contributions from others. We’re always interested in hearing from new writers and considering commissions! Again, get in touch.

• We also really want and need community tip-offs on interesting stories. If there’s something happening that you don’t feel is being covered or that you’d like us to investigate or report on, please get in touch! We are very willing to talk off the record to people and your contact will be treated in confidence and with respect. We may not always be able to cover the stories you let us know about: this may be for lack of resources to investigate and verify fully, or because it’s already being covered in a similar way by other media, and of course we are bound by the same rules and defamation laws that cover any other news organisation. But we will always try and we are always grateful! You can reach Ellie at emailellieobyrne@gmail.com or JJ on jj.odonoghue@gmail.com.

• Join the conversation on our social media accounts on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. We post our stories there and you can share and comment on stories you like.

  Síle Ní Dhubhghaill @sileharpist

  Macroom Municipal District is huge and encompasses the area from Ovens across to Ballyvourney, up to Millstreet and down as far as Ballingeary. There is massive dereliction in Macroom town alone and there have been no levies charged? Insanity.

  

  Tripe + Drisheen @TDrisheen

  #NEWS Only one of Cork County Council’s eight Municipal Districts charged any #derelict sites levies at all in 2022: here’s what they collected. https://t.co/SnWX6J7jo8

What about the future?

In an ideal world, we’d like Tripe + Drisheen to:

• be publishing daily

• have the resources for more investigative and long-form work

• have an office in a central location

• employ at least one part-time and one full-time staff member

• increase our pool of freelancers while continuing to pay them fairly

• run an annual selection of events, think-ins and panel discussions

• broaden our coverage into areas we’re not yet working in and involve more experts in our reporting

This isn’t a pipe dream! In Manchester, the Metropolitan area of which has a similar population to all of Cork county, the Manchester Mill recently hit 2,000 paid subscribers. They employ a team of three journalists from their income from subscriptions.

But we are determined to stay 100% independent in true Cork style: you won’t see any annoying advertising on Tripe + Drisheen, or any of those misleading “sponsored content” pages that look like an article but turn out to be an ad. Our only commitment is to our readers and to faithfully reporting what we witness in the world.

This means that Tripe + Drisheen’s only income is from our subscribers. As the founder and editor, that means that we are currently part-time and need to work other jobs to make ends meet. And this means a limit on the energy we can give to Tripe + Drisheen. If you do decide to subscribe, or to upgrade from a free sign-up to a paid plan, you will be supporting us not only to maintain our current quality of service, but to take this small independent publication to a whole new level. If you trust us, we won’t disappoint.

New photo competition: the bridges of Cork County

To all our readers, everyone who gets in touch, and everyone who sees the value in our work: from the bottom of our hearts, thank you. You are what it’s all about.