Sunday Independent appoints McCaughren as business editor
SAMANTHA McCaughren has been appointed Business Editor of the Sunday Independent.
McCaughren joins the Sunday Independent from the Sunday Times, where she has served as columnist and business correspondent since 2013. Her first column appears next Sunday.
She is the latest senior hire to the INM business team following the appointment of Ronald Quinlan as Group Commercial Property Editor, Donal O’Donovan as Irish Independent Business Editor and Dearbhail McDonald as INM Group Business Editor.
Stephen Rae, Editor-in-Chief at INM, said the appointment demonstrated the media company’s “strong commitment to the best coverage of business matters at all levels.” He said the appointment serves as further proof of INM’s dedication to “improved business coverage across our editorial platforms including the market-leading Sunday Independent.” McCaughren is one of Ireland’s leading business journalists. She previously served as chief business correspondent with the Sunday
Business Post, where she worked for six years.
She was also acting deputy business editor with the Irish
Independent, where she worked for seven years, serving as the newspaper’s media editor and a senior business correspondent.
McCaughren holds a Masters in Journalism and an honours degree in English and sociology from Trinity College Dublin. Last week INM reported a profit before tax of €18.5m for the six months to the end of June 2016. The company’s cash balance at the end of June was €62.4m and it is set to increase further by the end of the year. Directors have said they are not proposing to make a dividend payment in 2016 but instead are focused on using the company’s growing cash pile for investment, including potentially large-scale acquisitions of digital business outside Ireland. Group chief executive Robert Pitt said the search for deals was focused outside Ireland and away from traditional media.