Richard Delevan, business editor at the Sunday Tribune, sometime blogger and a bit of a general social media/tech evangelical type lost his job yesterday. He and I were never going to agree politically but he ‘got’ blogging and told other people about it and was a very entertaining speaker at last years Blogging the Election conference. I began reading his column shortly after his appointment and of course his recruitment of Mulley as a columnist actually had me and many others buying/reading the paper.

(Probably part of Tribune getting with the yoof or something – we keep being told about the Trib’s move to alternative parts of the Sunday reading market…though how they were meant to be doing that with such a crap website is the 4th Secret of Fatima! They do write a lot about blogs though including Maman Poulet – yesterday I got a mention – explains why all those green party members are reading me and beating their hearts or something.)

Anyway I hadn’t even got to fully digesting his column on gay marriage yesterday (and getting ready to send him the odd pink ribbon wrapped torpedo!) when I heard about the news.

On Sunday Richard wrote a story (republished on Dan’s blog as the Tribune site is down) pointing to some bloggers who had raised the issue of the auctioneer who could not sell his own house despite him telling all and sundry that was not a property crisis. Auctioneer is heavy advertiser with newspaper group who own Tribune. Do you smell anything yet??

Ken McDonald, the man who seems to be having difficulty in selling his house has spent a lot of time telling people to stop crying wolf about the Irish economy…Telling the Sunday Indo last March..

Why do we allow scaremongers and doomsayers with unfounded pessimism and unbridled negativity dictate our thinking and blunt consumer confidence? The Irish economy is the envy of the world. Job creation is phenomenal with more than 7,000 new jobs being created each month – despite the gloomy attention given to periodic job losses in some sectors.

Unemployment stands at 4.1%, the lowest in Europe; there are 750,000 more people in the workplace than a decade ago. We have revitalised cities and towns, a conveyor belt of entrepreneurial business people operating successfully on a world stage, a rich cultural and artistic heritage, a vibrant talented young population, rising by almost 100,000 per year, confident in their own and their country’s destiny. We should be celebrating our success on a daily basis. In any event, the Irish love affair with property will continue undaunted despite the knockers.

Well it took all of a few minutes for people to smell things when news emerged about the firing at the Turbine. Read all about it here, here, here and here. There is a lot of digging and speculating going on and whilst it’s alleged that it is not this story alone that has Richard without employment this morning, it would seem that there may have been difficulties present for some time from management with Richard’s analysis, the pointing of fingers at the great thing we should not speak about (ie. property bubble bursting and the shoot the naysayer crew) provided the management with their chance…Watch all those spaces, it could get interesting! The big shovels are out for a bit of digging!

Coincidentally on Sunday Gavin O’Reilly, group chief operating officer, Independent News & Media (part owner of the Tribune) was speaking at the Society of Editors conference in Manchester. Gavin (Sir Tony Junior) is also current president of the World Association of Newspapers and spends a lot of time going round the world saying that the sky is not falling in.

“I want to suggest that the future health of the newspaper industry has little to do with online per se. “In fact, our biggest challenge isn’t the latest new fangled technological application, it is consumer apathy.”

And how exactly would consumers become apathetic Mr. O’Reilly?