Thursday, February 12th: The latest JNLR results, JNLR/Ipsos 2025-4 (January to December 2025) puts Newstalk in prime position for audience growth, amid its major schedule launch earlier this month. Newstalk now informs and entertains a weekly audience of 849,000 – a sizeable increase of 17,000 listeners book-on-book.
Pat Kenny, who recently swapped his record-breaking mid-morning show and will shortly begin weekends on Newstalk, left his 9am-12pm slot on a high with a listenership of 206,000 (+10,000 BoB). Last week saw The Claire Byrne Show launch in this timeslot.
The Hard Shoulder, in its former guise, recorded a listenership of 149,000 (-1,000). Ciara Kelly and Shane Coleman took over the programme just last week, after moving from a very successful tenure on Newstalk Breakfast, where their morning audience stood at 158,000 (-3,000 BoB).
Anton Savage, who now presents Newstalk Breakfast as part of the new schedule, also left his former titular weekend programme on a record high, departing with a listenership of 164,000 on Saturdays (+18,000 BoB) confirming his popularity and appeal among Newstalk audiences across the country.
Andrea Gilligan’s Lunchtime Live now has a listenership of 109,000 listeners (-7,000 BoB) while Moncrieff entertains an afternoon audience of 92,000 listeners (-5,000 BoB).
Continuing on the all-time high trend, Newstalk weekends recorded bumper numbers for Off The Ball hosted by John Duggan, with a Saturday listenership of 161,000, an increase of 11,000 BoB and Sunday audience of 157,000, an increase of 2,000 BoB. Down to Business with Bobby Kerr, also achieved an audience milestone, with Saturday listenership now at 137,000 (+12,000 BoB).
Newstalk’s national market share now stands at 7.5% (-0.1% BoB) in a period when 3.4million adults tune into Irish radio each weekday.
Eric Moylan, Managing Editor of Newstalk, said: “This has been another excellent performance by our weekend teams to deliver several record highs on both Saturday and Sunday. The increase for The Pat Kenny Show is well deserved and shows what a big attraction he will be as he moves his show to the weekend from March.
These figures set us up well as we embark on a new era for the station. We’ve had a really strong start to our updated schedule with listeners loving hearing Anton, Claire and Shane & Ciara in their new slots. The teams have been working incredibly hard to deliver outstanding radio and we can’t wait to show the public some of the exciting things and moments we have planned in the coming months.”
All quoted figures are from JNLR/Ipsos 2025-4 (January to December 2025)