An urgent product recall note sent electronically to retailers on St Patricks Day, asking the recipients to “please remove all copies of the Meath Chronicle” dated 19th March from sale with immediate effect has caused no little confusion from retailers, many of whom were concerned that their normal expectation of sales would not be realised as it became clear that the publisher was not going to provide a re-run of the paper without the offending article (which, it transpired related to an inadvertent journalistic error of identifying a minor).
Retailers of the paper earn in the region of 55cent for each copy of the Chronicle they sell. As we all know, there is still a healthy appetite for well published local news and many outlets sell in excess of 100 copies – that is a real loss of €55 to the business that week. While there is no automatic entitlement to compensation, it would be a welcome gesture from the publishers of the paper, Celtic Media to acknowledge the loss incurred by their partners in the route to market, the retailer.
We accept that as retailers, we have an obligation to prevent the dissemination of defamatory material once notice is given, but it would be appreciated that our loss, through no fault of ours, is properly acknowledged.