Irish Examiner view: Ted Crosbie

Newspaper doyen

Ted Crosbie at his home in 2018. He was the chief executive of the Examiner group from the early 1980's until 1993. Picture: Eddie O'Hare

When Cork’s Crosbie family relinquished control of the Irish Examiner, The Echo, and other associated weekly and digital publishing interests in 2018, it was the elder statesman of the company who featured in a poignant picture portrait at the centre of our front page.

‘Crosbies meet their final deadline after 146 years,’ said the headline. And this weekend Ted Crosbie, a publishing leader indelibly associated with this newspaper and its home city, passed on, leaving saddened relatives and friends and a
thousand memories. 

Ted, the dominant force for more than three decades in this company, was in many ways an ideal proprietor. He was committed to editorial excellence without interfering in the work of journalists, and a visionary in his understanding of the impact of new technologies upon modern production and communications. He was happy to argue about the relative merits of typefaces, the most efficient ways of configuring a press, and to explain the importance of costs management to the newsroom.

“Money doesn’t grow on trees,” he would growl over any extravagance which fell short of serving the reader.

Ted would say he was “a chemist by training, a shovel engineer by vocation, and a manager by desperation”.

Others, usually from outside Cork, liked to categorise him as one of the ‘merchant princes’ and it is true that he knew the importance of creating and building commerce. But at his core he was that old-fashioned thing, a newspaperman’s newspaperman. He was decent, resilient, good, and, in many ways, great. His sagacity and humour will be missed.