Gay Community News, based in Dublin, is Ireland

Ireland

Ireland is an island to the northwest of continental Europe. It is the third-largest island in Europe and the twentieth-largest island on Earth...

's longest-running LGBT

LGBT

LGBT is an initialism that collectively refers to "lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender" people. In use since the 1990s, the term "LGBT" is an adaptation of the initialism "LGB", which itself started replacing the phrase "gay community" beginning in the mid-to-late 1980s, which many within the...

 publication. First published on 10 February 1988 when Tonie Walsh

Tonie Walsh

Tonie Walsh in Dublin, Ireland, is an LGBT rights activist, journalist, disc jockey and founder of Irish Queer Archive.-Biography:...

 and Catherine Glendon, both activists on the Dublin gay scene, decided it was time for Ireland’s gay and lesbian population to have a free publication of their own. It has been published consistently each month, with one exception. GCN is owned and published by the National Lesbian and Gay Federation (NLGF Ltd), which is a voluntary organisation. GCN was originally funded by the Irish state during the economically difficult 1980s and early 1990s, a combination of a policy-driven scaling back of this funding and the improvement of Ireland's financial fortunes allowed it to become a commercial entity in 2003, although it still carries funding banners from the National Development Plan

National Development Plan

National Development Plan is the title given by the Irish Government to a scheme of organised large-scale expenditure on national infrastructure. The period covered by the seven year plan runs from 2000 to 2006. A second National Development Plan is currently in progress and is due to run until...

 and Pobal

Pobal

Pobal is a bilingual English-Irish current affairs programme broadcast each Sunday evening at 17:30 on RTÉ One. It acts as the bilingual sister to Nationwide. It has been presented by Síle Seoige, now one half of Seoige. Each show is filmed from a different location in rural Ireland and it is now...

.

The editorial focus of GCN continues to be rights and community based. The magazine reports on political developments in Ireland and throughout the world, and is a key source of information for gay men, lesbians, bisexuals and transsexual people in Ireland, providing them with details of all community, cultural and social events and initiatives. It is also the only publication in Ireland with regular coverage of developments for HIV positive people. GCN also has regular celebrity interviews, lifestyle features, film, book and music reviews and social columnists. It has 33,000 readers and is distributed across Ireland, north and south.

Brian Finnegan was appointed editor of GCN in March 2003. He came to the publication to change it from a free political newspaper into a commercially viable magazine, without sacrificing the original ideals of the founding publishers.

GCN's online presence began in 2000. The website was relaunched in April 2008 and it features constantly updated news and gossip stories, features, daily gay TV listings, daily scene and community listings, video, podcast and other downloadable content and bloggers.