More has been said in private about journalist Aoife-Grace Moore than is ever likely to make it safely into print here at The Burkean.
We will leave it at that.
The Derry-born scribe has carved out a prominent media profile since the Golfgate scandal six summers ago, operating in a space between a Sinn Féin-adjacent gadfly, and women’s rights advocate through a steady drum of columns and investigative pieces active both sides of the border.
Making her way onto the nation’s bookshelves through a Mary Lou sympathetic insider account into the Shinner political project as it attempts to enter the Department of Taoiseach once and for all Moore (and her derriere) infamously became embroiled in the Barbara J Pym Twitter scandal that rightly felled veteran Stickie operator Eoghan Harris
Something of a popular force among female-centred new media news that the high flying Moore will take the helm as editor of Joe.ie came as something of a industry surprise when it broke early this week.
Infamous for the 2017 clickfarm scandal that nearly snuffed out the publication entirely and heavily embarrassed various new hires including Ellen Coyne, Joe has been wandering around the fringes of Irish media ever since.
The scandal which centred around claims that Joe had inflated viewing figures contributed to the exit of founder Niall McGarry and resulted in the clickbait publication entering into a financial tailspin for much of the past decade despite respectable viewing figures.
In 2024, The Sunday Times reported that Joe Media was later rescued by co-founder of Setanta Sports Mickey O’Rourke, after tethering on the brink of insolvency.
Straddling the noble world of serious politics and the content-mines of clickbait, JOE appears once again determined to be taken seriously as a journalistic force, hoping trusting that everyone has forgotten the little click-farm unpleasantness that once made it look less like a newsroom and more like a two-bit engagement laundrette.
Its British cousin publication across the Irish Sea, meanwhile, somehow managed the trick JOE.ie always craved: turning laddish clickbait into a recognisable media brand.
Moore and her street cred fit perfectly into this picture.
Millennial. Leftist. Easy on the eye (three drinks in, perhaps) and with enough cultural purchase and Bogside charm to make editors swoon, Moore is likely to herald another stab by JOE at breaking into the big leagues.
Ultimately, JOE’s own DNA sets a hard ceiling on the whole exercise.
However many serious hires it makes, it remains a site whose bread and butter financially comes from clickbait videos of Hugh Jackman trilaing Irish snacks rather than shoepolish journalism.There is only so much gravitas one can bolt onto a brand when the audience has been trained to arrive for celebrity junk-food videos and pub-chat politics.
The Irish Times can publish light features because its seriousness is already assumed. JOE has the inverse problem: even when it does real journalism, it has to drag the rest of the site’s baggage into the room with it.
At some point, the question becomes whether JOE is building a newsroom or merely placing a serious-looking hat on a clickbait donkey. To that end let’s see how long Moore lasts.
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