Goldhawk is finally biting the dust and this time the legendary Phoenix won’t be rising from the ashes.
According to the Irish Times this morning, Ireland’s favourite bimonthly gossip rag is shutting up shop for good at the end of the month. Sayonara. Go n-éirí an bóthar leat etc Plagued by dwindling readers and a bungled digital transition that seemed to avoid the online world entirely the Phoenix is reported to have entered voluntary liquidation with immediate effect though is yet to formally comment.
Joining the Sunday Tribune in journalistic Valhalla, the Irish Times reporting hints at likely unease among the Phoenix’s tiny 10-person writing crew. Hard to blame them. The magazine that spent years gleefully roasting everyone else despite earned the venom of penmen nationwide for its own special brand of COVID-era cruelty: famously firing writers and axing office access with minimal notice.
Synonymous for its Pillars of Society, Youngbloods and its Goldhawk columns the mag had turned its hand to becoming Ireland’s antifascist webzine of note despite its recursive stories and self-sabotaging paywall. The past year the Burkean has lost track of the amount of pieces penned about Keith Woods’ alleged connections to British nationalism (sigh really?) as younger and hungrier outlets on the left, namely The Ditch, outflanked the Baggot Street title.
With only a tenth of its 1980s readership both the left and Irish society at large had moved on long before Goldhawk’s final moult. The audience that once looked to The Phoenix for establishment gossip and the occasional well-aimed dart now gets its blood sport elsewhere above all from The Ditch, which understood the digital ecosystem while The Phoenix seemed to regard the internet as a passing nuisance.
Structurally the Phoenix was cooked years ago, staying on on shop stands almost like a journalistic antique, or rather or geriatric with enough sympathy and clout to prevent it being shipped off to the glue factory until now.
On a certain civic level the closure is something of a loss in a conformity ridden Irish media ecosystem where any hint of initiative often walloped with defamation letters or worse still the prospect of surviving off the government dole through journalistic subsidies either directly or through advertising.
Alas.
The Phoenix has spent decades bravely exposing everyone else’s scandals. Turns out its own obituary was the one story it couldn’t spin.
Rest in pieces, you glorious, sleazy old bird.
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