Dungannon Herald

About Dungannon Herald

Overview

The Dungannon Herald was a weekly newspaper serving Dungannon and the wider south and east Tyrone area of County Tyrone, Northern Ireland. Launched in August 2017 by the Omagh-based North West News Group, it was created to plug a local news gap left by the closure of the Dungannon Observer and a string of other Observer Newspapers titles. Published every Thursday with what its editor described as the lowest cover price of any paid-for newspaper in the region, the paper built a loyal readership over five and a half years before merging with its sister title, the Tyrone Herald, into a single combined edition in February 2023. The final standalone edition of the Dungannon Herald appeared on Thursday 9 February 2023. Today the paper's heritage continues within the all-new Tyrone Herald, while the North West News Group's digital portal We Are Tyrone serves readers across the county. The group's website is northwestnewsgroup.com.

The Dungannon Herald's story is a bright chapter in the recent history of the Northern Ireland weekly press: a new print launch at a time when most launches were digital, an independent family-owned publisher investing in local journalism, and a merger that the company presented as making the title bigger and better rather than closing it.

The gap it was launched to fill

The Dungannon Herald was born out of a crisis in Tyrone's local press. In April 2017, Observer Newspapers NI closed the Dungannon Observer along with ten other titles, blaming a steady decline in advertising and readership that had left the publications struggling to sustain themselves. The closures left Dungannon, one of County Tyrone's principal towns, without its own dedicated weekly newspaper.

The North West News Group, the Omagh-based publisher already responsible for the Ulster Herald, the Tyrone Herald, the Fermanagh Herald and the twice-weekly Donegal News, saw an opportunity. Within months of the Observer's closure, the group announced it would launch a new weekly for the town. The first edition of the Dungannon Herald was published in August 2017, and its launch was covered by the Press Gazette as a rare example of a new print newspaper launch in the modern era.

The launch demonstrated the confidence of an independent, family-owned publisher in the enduring appetite for a quality local weekly, even as the wider industry contracted. Rather than simply extending an existing title's distribution, the group created a distinct Dungannon paper with its own identity, staff and editorial focus.

The launch and its promise

At the launch, the paper's editor, Nigel McDonagh, who also edited the group's other Tyrone titles, pledged to give a voice back to the local community. Copies went on sale in Dungannon and across the wider south and east Tyrone area, priced at £1, which McDonagh described as the lowest cover price of any paid-for newspaper in the region.

McDonagh told the Press Gazette that feedback had already shown a widespread desire for a weekly newspaper in the Dungannon area, saying: "While there are very many social media sites out there, we firmly believe that a quality newspaper remains the most effective vehicle for creating a real sense of community and that will be at the core of what we do, while also maintaining the very highest editorial standards."

The paper was produced by the locally owned North-West News Group, which at the time published seven weekly newspapers including the Donegal News, Fermanagh Herald, Strabane Chronicle, Ulster Herald, Tyrone Herald and the Gaelic games paper Gaelic Life. Being part of a group with deep roots in Tyrone journalism gave the new title experienced reporters, established printing and distribution arrangements, and the credibility of a publisher the community already knew.

Dungannon and its district

Dungannon is a market town in County Tyrone, historically the seat of the O'Neill dynasty and one of the county's principal urban centres. It sits at the heart of a rich agricultural hinterland and serves as a commercial and administrative hub for south and east Tyrone, with strong links to the food processing and engineering industries that characterise the area's economy.

The paper's circulation area took in the town and the surrounding villages and rural districts of south and east Tyrone, communities with their own strong identities, from the Clogher Valley to the shores of Lough Neagh. Like all good weeklies, the Dungannon Herald's pages reflected this geography: town news alongside village notes, farming coverage for the rural readership, and sport spanning Gaelic games, soccer, rugby and road bowling.

Dungannon's position in mid-Ulster, with its mix of urban and rural, nationalist and unionist traditions, gave the paper a varied and engaged readership, and its coverage of council affairs, planning, schools and community life aimed to serve all sections of the community.

The North West News Group

The Dungannon Herald was published by the North West of Ireland Printing and Publishing Company, better known as the North West News Group, a family-owned newspaper company based in Omagh, County Tyrone. The company was established in 1901 by the Lynch family with the launch of the Ulster Herald, and expanded rapidly in the following years, adding the Derry People, now the Donegal News, and the Fermanagh Herald in 1902, and purchasing the Strabane Chronicle, which had been established in 1896.

The group launched the Tyrone Herald in November 2004 and a Monday edition of the Donegal News in November 2006, and began publishing the weekly Gaelic games paper Gaelic Life in January 2007. Its flagship, the Ulster Herald, won the Newspaper Society's Weekly Newspaper of the Year awards in both 2003 and 2004, and the group's combined circulation for the first half of 2010, excluding Gaelic Life, was 53,038, making it one of the largest family-owned newspaper companies in Ireland.

The company describes itself as one of Ireland's leading independently-owned media companies, and its continued investment in print, launching the Dungannon Herald in 2017 at a time of industry-wide retrenchment, underlined that independence.

Editorial coverage

The Dungannon Herald was a general-interest weekly in the classic mould. Its news pages covered Dungannon and district council affairs, planning and development, crime and the courts, education, health, farming and rural life, business and community campaigns. The paper's reporters attended the meetings, covered the court sittings and knocked on the doors that sustain a local paper's authority.

Sport was a major pillar of the paper, reflecting Tyrone's passionate sporting culture. Gaelic games coverage was extensive, with detailed reports on club and county action, alongside soccer, rugby, golf, boxing, angling and motorsport. The Tyrone county footballers' fortunes, in particular, guaranteed the paper's sports pages a devoted readership.

The paper also carried the weekly essentials: family notices and announcements, church and community news, farming pages, property, motors and recruitment advertising, school features, and a letters page. Its Thursday publication day placed it in the traditional slot for Northern Ireland weeklies, on sale in local newsagents across the district.

The digital shift: We Are Tyrone

In November 2021, the North West News Group took a significant digital step, merging the websites of its four Northern Ireland newspapers, the Ulster Herald, Tyrone Herald, Strabane Chronicle and Dungannon Herald, into a single online portal called We Are Tyrone, and introducing an online paywall. The paywall came into effect on 1 November, with combined print and online subscriptions available from £1 per week.

Editor Nigel McDonagh said the move was necessary to develop new revenue streams, describing it as an exciting time for the company and the wider Tyrone community, both at home and abroad, and arguing that the changes would bring readers closer together. The group's digital development manager, Linsay Fenton, said the new daily news and entertainment hub had been developed by the company's in-house digital, marketing, design and editorial teams, with regular updates, exclusive online content, video material and weekly podcasts.

While the websites and social media channels rebranded, the group stressed that its Tyrone newspapers would continue to serve the local community as they had done for over a century, providing the same high-quality news, views and sport through an improved platform.

Merger with the Tyrone Herald

In February 2023, the company announced that the Tyrone Herald and the Dungannon Herald would merge into one single edition. The final standalone edition of the Dungannon Herald was published on Thursday 9 February 2023, and the titles continued as a combined edition under the Tyrone Herald name.

The group presented the merger as part of the future development of its print and digital platforms in Tyrone, which also include the Ulster Herald, the Strabane Chronicle and the We Are Tyrone website. On the final day of publication for the standalone Dungannon Herald, the group's team went out to Newell Stores in Dungannon to thank readers personally, giving each customer who bought the paper a free coffee and explaining the plans for the all-new Tyrone Herald.

The company was keen to reassure readers that the Dungannon Herald was going nowhere but was becoming bigger and better alongside the Tyrone Herald. The Tyrone Herald itself had been launched in 2004 and had been one of the county's leading weekly newspapers for nearly twenty years; the North West News Group had launched the Dungannon Herald in 2016–17, and since then it had built up what the company called a loyal and dedicated readership.

Legacy

Though its run as a standalone title lasted just over five years, the Dungannon Herald left its mark. It proved that a new print weekly could be launched successfully in the twenty-first century when backed by a committed local publisher, and it restored a dedicated newspaper voice to a town that had lost one.

Its bound editions and the group's digital archives preserve a record of Dungannon life between 2017 and 2023: the council debates, the court cases, the school successes, the farming year, the GAA championship runs and the everyday milestones of births, marriages and deaths. For the readers who bought it each Thursday, the paper's merger into the Tyrone Herald was not an ending but a continuation, with Dungannon news still covered within the combined edition and on the We Are Tyrone platform.

The Dungannon Herald's story also stands as a case study in the resilience of the independent regional press in Ireland: a family-owned company, rooted in Omagh since 1901, investing in new journalism for a neighbouring town while larger groups were closing titles, and adapting through digital consolidation to keep local news alive.