THE LAYOUT of the Irish Times conference room suggests a daily paper optimistically looking forwards, but with one foot planted proudly in the past.

The future is represented by the paper's website, projected on to one wall during the conference; the past by the ornately carved Victorian throne from which the paper's formidable editor Geraldine Kennedy gives audience to the broadsheet's afternoon schedule, an unchanged ritual in the 150 years since the paper's foundation.

The Irish Times is Ireland's second-largest daily broadsheet after the Irish Independent. Establishment-minded, possibly slightly stuffy, it sees itself as the Republic of Ireland's paper of record. It sells about 119,000 copies a day, employs 186 reporters (out of about 500 staff) and maintains a full-time network of foreign correspondents across the world.

The story of Ireland's newspapers is ripe with opportunities for contrast and comparison to Scotland, where a debate currently rages about the future of our national newspapers. The point is not missed by the newspaper owner and former government minister Brian Wilson who, in a recent Sunday Herald interview, proposed the Irish Times as a model that the Scottish press might think about attempting to emulate.

Over the past three years, the Irish Times has achieved a circulation rise of about 5000 papers not an astonishing number but by UK standards it is a sign of vigorous good health in a media sector hit hard by the credit crunch-enhanced downturn in advertising.

In person, Kennedy is a frostily efficient operator, with little use for small talk let alone craic. She puts her paper's success down to the national appetite for the liberal, Irish-internationalist content her newspaper provides: "Our readers are very keen to see the raw facts and make up their own minds and we are very careful to sort out fact from comment. Our readers are educated, discerning and for a large part interested in their country's place in the world."

So committed is the paper to these principles, Kennedy says, they will even print unedited a 2000-word political speech and allow their readers to make up their own minds. It's not the kind of editorial decision likely to endear the paper to a casual reader but, according to Kennedy, "it's a service our readers expect of us".

The key to the success of the Irish Times, cited by Brian Wilson and others, is its ownership structure. Like the Guardian, the paper is owned by a trust focused not on shareholder returns but on "protecting the newspaper's independence and its journalism" as a route to popularity and profitability.

Founded in 1974, the Irish Times Trust, like the Scott Trust that owns the Guardian, has been diversifying of late. It has been snapping up Irish property websites and, sensing early on which way the print media wind was blowing, invested heavily in free newspapers, including a large stake in Dublin's Metro newspaper. All of this was done not simply to boost the bottom line but to ensure the future of the core product - the Irish Times.

Managing director Maeve Donovan, who unusually shares the same seniority level as Kennedy within the organisation's structure, says diversification has allowed the paper to plan effectively for an uncertain future.

Says Donovan: "One of the advantages of being a private company without beneficial shareholders is that it gives us freedom from the vagaries of the stock market, which can be very volatile and can exert pressures that are certainly detrimental to the product. We can take a long-term, more strategic view. We are 150 years old next year and we plan to be around for a very long time."

For Kennedy, the ownership status is simply "a wonderful advantage".

Despite such advantages, those who work on the paper insist it has never been a pain-free operation. A financial crisis in late 2001-02 led to widespread cost-cutting. Kennedy winces slightly when asked about the details, but explains the paper offered a third of its staff voluntary redundancy, while executive salaries were cut and international and regional coverage scaled back. However, reports of redundancy packages in the realm of 250,000 for experienced staff are likely to make Scottish hacks choke with envy.

Afan of the paper says the cutbacks led to "standards dropping, headlines becoming clunkier and more and more mistakes creeping in". Dublin University journalism lecturer Patrick Kinsella says reporters on the paper, like their counterparts all over the Western world, are "being forced to do more in less time. They feel they do not have enough time to spend working on their stories and the pressure is increasing all the time."

There is no celebratory atmosphere in the paper's nondescript new offices on Dublin's Tara Street. On the contrary, the afternoon atmosphere is one of calm anticipation of an oncoming storm. One staffer whispers that sales figures are not all they appear to be, pointing out that broadband proliferation remains low in Ireland, and that the paper expects to lose more readers to the internet before long.

Interestingly, The Irish Times website, Ireland.com, currently charges for some premium content - a business model rejected by almost all other newspaper publishers. The system was introduced in 2001 to generate revenue, but there are strong rumours the "pay wall" will very soon come crashing down, allowing the paper to compete with guardian.co.uk - the brand managing director Donovan repeatedly name checks - or the New York Times on the world stage the internet provides. Kennedy will only say the paper's internet strategy is "under review".

As long as there is no clear plan for how to generate substantial revenue from the internet, the long-term future of The Irish Times seems no more secure than that of any newspaper publishing group. But in editor Kennedy, the paper has a walking advert for the old-fashioned backbone essential in all great editors. Her paper recently played a key role in forcing the resignation of taoiseach Bertie Ahern over corruption allegations.

Kennedy herself shrugs off the opinion of a high-court judge that she showed a "flagrant disregard for the rule of law" in her decision to destroy the documents upon which the original stories were based and her refusal, along with reporter Colm Keena, to reveal the paper's sources.

So what does the current incumbent of The Irish Times' editorial throne make of the currently prevalent doomsday scenario for the print media?

Kennedy says she can't foresee a day when newspapers would cease to exist in Ireland, but she admits to being concerned: "I don't know how long we can stay immune to the threats. In Ireland we like words and we have one of the strongest media markets, but there is a challenge in how to engage younger readers. But it is my view there will always be a future for newspapers."