Magnate's rallying cry for media entrepeneurs

Just because there’s a recession shouldn’t mean people can’t be entrepreneurial – that was the advice given by self-made multi-millionaire, Denis O’Brien when he addressed the Connacht Tribune Centenary Conference, hosted by NUI Galway on Friday.Speaking directly to students of the MA in journalism degree course at the college, Mr O’Brien urged anyone with a good idea to “just go ahead and do it. There’s never a good time to set up a business.”His advice was in response to young journalists being worried about their future in an ailing newspaper industry and which looks set to be eventually swamped by new technology, namely the Internet. The morning session of the conference had been dominated by the web versus print editions with some panellists predicting that unless newspapers – even regional newspapers embraced the Internet for future readers, they would be left behind.And though Mr O’Brien has embraced multimedia, having started out in local radio, built a mobile phone empire, which will straddle forty countries eventually, and is now a major shareholder in INM, which owns the Irish and Sunday Independents, the London Independent and a number of local newspapers.In fact there was much national media interest in Mr O’Brien on the day because of the public row between him and the O’Reilly family, who up to now had majority control over the newspapers’ shares. Mr O’Brien calmly explained to the conference that “it isn’t personal, it’s financial” as he sent his audience into a spin as he spoke about the large sums of money he had spent on shares in a company that he thought “had the smarts to change with the times and me money.”He said he had hoped that the company would have listened to his advice but they hadn’t, which has now led to a full scale war between him and the O’Reillys for control. But on an upbeat note, Mr O’Brien, with his entrepreneurial skills, said that the regional press had a lot going for it as it knew its niche market – a local one that was happy with its local correspondents’ notes, reports from the courts and council, local politics and most importantly local sport. However, he did warn, that they too...