In this episode of Inside Media Relations, Jack Murray sits down with Ian Kehoe, Co-Founder and Executive Editor of The Currency, to explore what it takes to build a successful media brand, the importance of quality journalism and how the industry is evolving.
Drawing on a career spanning the Sunday Business Post, RTÉ’s Prime Time and the founding of The Currency, Ian reflects on his journey through Irish journalism, from reporting on the financial crisis to becoming a national newspaper editor at just 34 years of age.
The conversation explores the pressures of leading a newsroom, the challenges of building an independent media business and the decision to launch The Currency as a digital-first, subscription-based publication. Ian shares why investing in talented journalists, prioritising quality over quantity and understanding your audience are central to building a loyal readership.
He also reflects on some of the most challenging moments of his career, including the 17-day High Court defamation case involving Denis O’Brien, his experience on the RTÉ board during a period of intense public scrutiny and the importance of protecting journalistic integrity under pressure.
For PR and communications professionals, the discussion offers a valuable perspective on what journalists need to produce meaningful stories, why niche audiences can be more valuable than mass reach and how the relationship between media organisations and their audiences is changing.
At the centre of the conversation is a question facing the entire media industry: in an era of constant content, changing business models and artificial intelligence, how can quality journalism continue to earn the attention, trust and loyalty of its audience?
Transcript:
Jack Murray 0:00
Welcome to Inside Media Relations, the podcast for PR people, serious about getting their stories covered. I'm Jack Murray. In this episode, building a media brand: how to earn attention, trust, and loyalty. The media landscape is changing fast. So too is how journalists, audiences, and organizations connect. To discuss this and much more, I'm joined by Ian Kehoe, co-founder and executive editor of The Currency, former editor of the Sunday Business Post, and former reporter and presenter with RTE's Prime Time. Let's get inside media relations. Ian, you're very welcome today.
Ian Kehoe 0:33
Thanks very much for having me. I'm nervous.
Jack Murray 0:36
I don't see you nervous very often. Nervous. I'm
Ian Kehoe 0:38
nervous. Seriously, you have written the book on storytelling and how to build a narrative, I spend my days dealing with commas and looking at stories. So I'm nervous.
Jack Murray 0:47
So I want to. I'm almost fascinated in this kind of wild and wonderful world of the media. What piques someone's interest? Let's go back to Enniscorthy to the start, to the house that you grew up in, I know from doing the research that you were curious child. You were a talker. What was the environment like with your folks? What was going on around the kitchen table? Yeah, what was that like when you were growing up?
Ian Kehoe 1:17
Well, you say what house? I grew up in many houses. We moved around with almost whimsical indifference, so I can even when I take my kids down to an Enniscorthy. But my parents are still alive down there. I'm driving around. Used to live there. Used to live up that street. But I think the formative area was my dad was a house painter, and oh god, and it must have been about 1992 and 1993. The economy wasn't going well for house painters, and he bought a shop, a newsagent's just above the cathedral in the heart of Enniscorthy. And one of my jobs that I had to do was to get up every morning and bring in the newspapers, and I started to read them and started to get interested by them and looking at all of when they're all there, when you have every newspaper that you want sitting literally, and we lived behind the shop, we lived above the shop, we lived beside the shop. When there's that amount of news in your house every morning, you kind of gravitate towards it, and I was kind of intrigued, and I kind of went, I didn't know what I wanted to do. I knew I wanted, I liked writing, and I was really fascinated. I was kind of a curious person, and journalism seemed to make sense. So I almost fell into it that I ended up applying for journalism to college by accident.
Jack Murray 2:30
Talk to me about the newspapers and even the staging post at the newsagents was. So there's a place when I grew up in a local shop as well. So there's a place when you're in a local shop, and there's people coming. So side by side with having access to all of the national and the local news, it's a staging post for people coming, sharing stories and what what happened and what what did you learn about the community during the day and all that.
Ian Kehoe 2:53
Yeah, I mean, it's kind of Enniscorthy is a it's a it's a funny town. It's a beautiful town, one I'm still deeply connected with, I remember talking to. Sorry, if this is slightly off piece, but I'll get somewhere with it. I remember talking to the old Wexford County manager who's now running the the Ryder Cup, and he went, "If you were to establish a town from scratch, Enniscorthy is pretty much as close to what you would come up with if you're not by the sea. So if you're not by the sea, you have a a river going through it, so you've the Slaney flowing through the centre of the town. You've history in terms of 1916 Vinegar Hill. You've a Puget Cathedral sitting there overlooking the town's standing sentinel. You've got a castle. You've got a rich rural hinterland. So you've all of this, but at the same time, you've got a 32% unemployment rate,
Jack Murray 3:42
yeah,
Ian Kehoe 3:42
and it's generational unemployment. So you've got, on one hand, a beautiful town with a rich rural hinterland; on the other, lots of housing estates where people have never worked. So it marries those two things. So I suppose the people coming into the shop marry those two things. You would have rich farmers coming in one day, and they're buying. You know, you're putting aside the farmer's journal for them, and then you've other people who are living hand to mouth, and you're giving them credit. Or my dad was, and my mother was. You know, so they could go through the week before they get social welfare. So it was kind of a, it was a really interesting dichotomy of people who you met on a day to day basis. Now I have to say, I hated working in the shop. Yeah, and you know you have to do it because it's there. My sister, who was three years my elder, loved it, and she loved the banter. But I would have been a a shy enough child. That sort of engaging with the public was always something I find tough. I would find it much easier, even now, to go on television to talk about something, or to do a podcast and talk about something, or to stand up in front of a room of two or 3000 people and talk about something, then kind of stand behind the counter trying to sell somebody something on a one-on-one basis.
Jack Murray 4:50
Yeah, and like it's funny because I grew up in a small town as well, and there's that there's that dichotomy too that you you love where you're from that you're you're. Proud of it. It's what made you. And then, at a certain point, you just get this urge. Like, I need to get out of here. I need to get out of here to to do other things. I'm
Ian Kehoe 5:08
I'm not sure I ever had that urge. I think when you're from Enniscorthy and you want to go to college, like Dublin's the name of the game, unless you're going to Waterford, where I think there was like 120 people in my sixth year class, and I think a 40 or 50 of them went to what was then Waterford Institute of Technology. I know it's the Munster Tech University, or you know. But to me, Dublin, if I was going to do journalism, Dublin was the game.
Jack Murray 5:35
Yeah,
Ian Kehoe 5:36
and like there was only two courses at the time: there was DIT and DCU, and like no one from my family had gone from you know.
Jack Murray 5:44
And how soon did you realise? Oh, I want to do journalism. That's what I want to do. I think
Ian Kehoe 5:48
I think I I was debating heavily. I'm sorry, this wasn't an inner debate. I mean, I was debating kind of for my for my school and doing public speaking and things like that heavily when I was.
Jack Murray 6:01
That's a great skill, isn't it?
Ian Kehoe 6:02
Secondary school,
Jack Murray 6:03
isn't it? Great.
Jack Murray 6:04
That is like I remember. Well, I yeah, I remember getting to like working in politics and like looking in awe at someone like Joe Lennon, who was government press secretary. Like that notion of being able to hold an argument in front of people and kind of not drop the ball and like learning that skill, that formative skill, very early about thinking on your feet and being able to being able.
Ian Kehoe 6:22
I was only speaking. There was a brilliant public speaking tutor down in it. You know who who just did it, not out of any money. You know he was a history teacher, and I was only speaking to him yesterday. We're still in touch. He's just written another. He wrote a book on actually European GAA, and you kind of you develop those relations, but like he kind of took me under his wing, and it struck me. You know, it started off we were doing the local debates, but then we got into the national stuff, and you're going up to places like Gonzaga, you're you know, and it was a different world. Yeah, just a completely different world. You know, we're there in school with no, it's much better now. CBS, but with no CBS and Enniscorthy, with no facilities in it at all. And you're going up, and you're driving into these gated communities with golf courses, or you know, you go and play. We ended up playing tennis, for example, in Terenure, and they have their own tennis courts. And we're like, where did all these facilities come from? But
Jack Murray 7:15
that's where, like, I that
Ian Kehoe 7:17
that did shake me a lot. And I had a
Jack Murray 7:18
similar, like, I had a similar situation. I was in Garbally College, and we we used to go around and play friendlies in rugby against Black Rock College and Rockwell, and you'd be going in, and you'd be literally going to Mortal Kombat with these fellas, and you know we we won in some of these places, and it would it would give you that insight. Okay, it's not it's not all that.
Ian Kehoe 7:36
So I suppose I saw it from all that, from especially from the debating. You kind of got to see what kind of the fancy class, as we called it in Dublin, was like. Yeah. But I think I was curious. I was smart enough, like I was very good at English and history, but very bad at maths and Irish and German. You know, when I was kind of, I was able to game it out that I could get enough points to get into journalism in DCU. Now, I actually went to the wrong college on my first day. I went to UCD.
Jack Murray 8:06
It was completely straight off the bus.
Ian Kehoe 8:09
Straight off the bus. No, literally off the bus. Yeah. Because I hadn't sorted out digs at that time, and I went to UCD, and I'm wandering around the campus, going, "Jeez, this is big.
Jack Murray 8:18
Yeah.
Ian Kehoe 8:18
Where is it? And then I'm looking at. I'm kind of going.
Jack Murray 8:21
I'm in the wrong. I'm in
Ian Kehoe 8:22
on the wrong side of the city.
Jack Murray 8:23
So talk to me about your journalism class. There was a there was a place where DCU was building its reputation as a journalism school and did so spectacularly well, kind of in the last 20 years. Who was in your class that we still know as well? It was
Ian Kehoe 8:39
you kind of know when you go into a class, and I've gone out and spoken to many others. You know, you can you can game the quality pretty quickly, and it was it was really good. And we kind of knew that ourselves. It wasn't a secret. We were kind of cocky about it. Yeah,
Ian Kehoe 8:56
the lecturers kind of knew it. They gave us gave us a lot of leeway, so I'm just thinking, like, so we had Oliver Callum,
Jack Murray 9:07
yeah,
Ian Kehoe 9:07
who's still a friend of mine. So he's obviously, you know, Ollie turned up in first year with a with a voice from heaven, and suddenly, you know, he was getting offers of national radio contracts to read the news because he sounded like Brian Dobson, yeah, and that's because he was mimicking Brian Dobson. But anyway, he's gone on to do things. We had Sarah McInerney, obviously well known from RTE. We had Mary Regan, who's the political editor of the Sunday Independent. Her husband Paul O'Flynn, who's the prominent sports reporter. We've people who have David O'Siochan, who was the worked in PR, but was kind of on the most recent Lions tour, was the communications manager from the Lions tour with people who set up their own businesses in PR. Kian Murtaugh's out in RTE. You've got Gearoid Reidy. I'm just throwing names here. There's only 35 people in the class. Gearoid Ready, who's the chief. Columnist for Bloomberg over in Asia, and
Jack Murray 10:03
people forget. Like I remember, like when I started studying journalism, that like like journalism by its nature, and even at that starting level, it's very competitive, and people want to get on, they want to get the gig, they want to get the start. They're looking round, they're pointing their elbows, they're thinking, you know, there's a whole other crew coming behind me.
Ian Kehoe 10:22
I decided midway through it. I didn't want to be a journalist.
Jack Murray 10:26
Okay.
Ian Kehoe 10:26
I, you know, I was still debating heavily, and again, debating in the sense of going off, traveling the world, debating.
Jack Murray 10:32
Yeah. You did a stint in America in college.
Ian Kehoe 10:34
I did. Yeah. I was lucky to get a scholarship to go out there for a period out to out to California, and that was great.
Jack Murray 10:40
Yeah.
Ian Kehoe 10:40
But I was still kind of I kind of the more I was getting into it, the more I went. God, this isn't for me. This journalism thing, and I was very fortunate in had the best college job ever. So, by stint of a friend and a bit of luck and the college helping me out, I got a job in Croke Park, in the press office.
Jack Murray 11:00
Okay,
Ian Kehoe 11:01
so you know an office in Crow Park, and you're working there
Jack Murray 11:04
close to DCU.
Ian Kehoe 11:05
It was close to DCU, so I'd be cycling around and in and out. Like my job was, you know, make sure there was press accreditation, helping out to get press accreditation sorted. If there's complaints that I can deal with, deal with them. This is
Jack Murray 11:16
what while you're at college. Yeah, so
Ian Kehoe 11:18
they were very nice. Danny Lynch, who was kind of a famous PR guy back in the day, you know. Had his own inimitable style. He had never had, and what they call now, an intern. And if I had said to him, "I'm an intern, he wouldn't have known what I meant. But he'd never had somebody in from him that time. But we kind of got on well. He kind of he was
Jack Murray 11:36
seconded from the OPW. He certainly was. Where I happened to like have a stint in my career, and there was kind of his legend Lou. Yeah, it was, and
Ian Kehoe 11:45
it was at the professional
Jack Murray 11:46
Kerry man, yeah,
Ian Kehoe 11:46
completely. And it was at the time Croke Park was being redeveloped, so you were dealing with the planning issues, and you were dropping tickets off to people and stuff like that. But it was a fascinating time. So I worked there full time during the summer, and then Danny basically let me come in whenever I had time and space during the week, and I'd build them for the hours or the days that I had done. And like that was a really interesting place where you can learn that intersection. Now I knew nothing about the GAA,
Jack Murray 12:13
yeah,
Ian Kehoe 12:13
but learn that intersection of politics, of people, of power, of how to deal with committees and stuff like that. It was a great training ground, and I remember like being in college, saying I might just go work there. You know, the option would have been there to do something. You know, maybe not in the press of, but in a different department in Croke Park, I was there four or five years. It was
Jack Murray 12:33
yeah, it
Ian Kehoe 12:33
was a great place to work. And then I remember I got an option to do a masters in DCU, and I went right. That gives me a year to think about it
Jack Murray 12:42
in international relations.
Ian Kehoe 12:43
international relations, but at the end, just as that was coming up, I did a placement in the business post, and the idea was the placement was it was, you know, two months. Learn a bit about it. We've had people in. We had people in there over the years in the same thing, but I got on really well. Really started to enjoy it. Really starting to enjoy writing. I had never thought about business journalism.
Jack Murray 13:07
Who was that? No, it
Ian Kehoe 13:09
was Ted Harding. Ted Harding. Ted Harding at the time. Yeah.
Jack Murray 13:12
What's your view on this notion of like journalism, almost like a vocation, and that it's it's a hard career, and that people do get this hankering or their calling to to work in it, and when they get bitten by the bug, they want to stay.
Ian Kehoe 13:26
I think there's nothing quite like the first couple of times seeing your name in print. Now I'd done some stuff with the Wexford Echo and the Enniscorthy Echo, which sadly no longer exist, and that was great. And my mother still has the clippings, but I remember getting the first couple of bylines in the business post, and I went. God, there's something about this, and what I found was, you know, at that time, and I still think it to this day, you get exposed to people that you would never get exposed to. Now, there's all sorts of stuff that you have to deal with, and there's the bad stories that you have to write and the investigations, but it's an absolute privilege to be able to sit down with presidents or prime ministers or CEOs of companies or people who've led really interesting lives and have great stories to tell, and like you don't get that anywhere else. And they take the calls from you and they talk to you and they'll sit down and have a coffee and they'll be open and have that. So I kind of love that. And midway through, when I was doing this, midway through my masters, I kept on writing for the Business Post. They offered me a job, and the day I finished college, day I finished my masters, I started full time with the Business Post.
Jack Murray 14:31
And you progressed really quickly, like when you went in there, the the opportunity was there, and you you know yeah, there had been
Ian Kehoe 14:38
there had been a reshuffle. I'll put it that way. So it's you know, so
Jack Murray 14:41
this was about 2004. Yeah, 2004.
Ian Kehoe 14:44
Nature reports a vacuum. Ted had left. Cliff Taylor, who's now with the Irish Times, came in as editor. Simon Carswell had been promoted up to news editor, who's now the news editor of the Irish Times. And I suppose there was a gap for somebody just to cover pure business, not PLC, not stock markets. Stuff, but just granular, real, you know, the shopkeeper, the company's doing well, the company's going out of business. I kind of I made it a point of just going around all of the country and interviewing business people who were doing interesting things, chasing them down, looking at like who are the people nominated for the EY Entrepreneur of the Year this year, who are the people winning the local enterprise awards, and traveling on bus? I couldn't drive the time, traveling on the bus and just interviewing them.
Jack Murray 15:28
And I remember, like when I when I started out, like just being fascinated by like the bravery of the fact that the Business Post actually existed, that it's the newest national newspaper, that these four founders went out on a limb and that they got this thing up off the ground and like it was working. It was I was like it was just like a real breath of fresh air.
Ian Kehoe 15:50
Yeah, I'm like it was such a great team in there. Yeah, you know, and I really I loved it. I was also really fortunate to have great people like Simon or Cliff or Gavin Daly or these people. But I think one of the areas I started covering again by accident, I started covering insolvency, and so I got to meet you know what companies were going out of business, all that sort of stuff, and I used to try and talk to the founders or the liquidators, but it was the boom, Jack. Yeah, and then
Jack Murray 16:18
you were well warmed up by the boom crash.
Ian Kehoe 16:21
Sorry, I was writing about you know Midland Electrical going bust with debts of 80,000, and then suddenly you're writing about building companies going bust with debts of 800 million to 3 billion. So I was kind of perfectly placed for that kind of bust piece, and I suppose that's where my career really took off.
Jack Murray 16:37
And then you decided that you wanted to completely change medium and go into television, and like you would have been doing pieces in RTE as a journalist, but to to jump from the Business Post into prime time then was a and and I remember when the news came across. Oh, that's that's interesting because like you know it's not it's not that often that someone makes such a jump into TV journalism from from a Sunday newspaper,
Ian Kehoe 17:01
yeah, it's kind of everyone gets offered jobs over the years, and most of the time you kind of think about it or you use it as leverage to get a few created, or you know that's being honest. And I remember thinking, God, prime time that could be interesting. And again, it was the height of the Celtic of the collapse. You know, the the global financial crisis. Irish companies were teetering on the edge, you know. The banks were going bust. It was a great time to be doing it, and I kind of got the opportunity to go out there. I kind of took it. I really enjoyed it. Television is a completely different medium. That's what struck me.
Jack Murray 17:35
How did that affect your your skill set? Where there's a bit where when I've had written, it'll be written. It just obviously doesn't apply anymore with the way things are now, but just lights, cameras, two things, all that.
Ian Kehoe 17:46
Two things: words matter. So, in you know, in tele in newspapers or even in you know online publications can stretch things out. You can keep on writing in television. You have to be very very disciplined. Over you know, you can get 180 words into something per minute. You have to have your clips from other people. You have to drill it back down, distill it. Even if you have something, you produce it in that. The other thing that I think was the biggest lesson that I learned in television was the importance of visuals. So I'd come from a print basis. I didn't, and I wasn't on the news desk. I would just write my stories, and I would see that in the paper. When you're out there and you're working with great producers and great editors, you realize. You know, I remember talking to an editor, and I said, "I have this story, and he goes, "It's a great story, but how are we going to make it look on television? Like, what's the visual that you're going to have it? You can't just have it, and especially prime time where it's a magazine show. It's not like the news where you can you know have file footage of the Oireachtas or Leinster House or a river or something,
Jack Murray 18:47
and like 12 or 14 minutes is a long time.
Ian Kehoe 18:49
Yeah. Well, and at that time we were doing 15/20 minute packages because there was an insatiable appetite for news covering the crisis.
Jack Murray 18:58
And like like it's you know three seconds of a bad clip is is it like just yeah yeah
Ian Kehoe 19:02
and that that struck me when I went back to when I went to editing the business post that you know what people are drawn not just to the story but to how it's presented and to the pictures that you choose and to the graphics and the design and how it all looks that it's all part of the one medium. I think people overlook that at times.
Jack Murray 19:21
And look, we'll we'll get into Dennis O'Brien a bit in a minute. But like at that point in your career, then you're exposed to the banking collapse to Anglo Irish Bank. You begin to you collaborate with your your colleague from the Business Post, Gavin Daly, on on the book Citizen Quinn, and you develop good expertise around that-that's that's a big career milestone as well.
Ian Kehoe 19:43
Yeah, I'd actually gone. It's funny. I was in RTE two years. I kind of went. I was ambitious, and I kind of looked around and went, "It's going to take something pretty heavy here for me to kind of move up the ranks or do something different, and. I had the opportunity to go back to the business post as kind of associate editor and business editor. I had more titles, you know, and it was a kind of a strange move to make because a lot of people kind of decide that they want to get into national television and they go to the national broadcaster and that's it and they never leave. Yeah, and I was kind of going, maybe. Look, I've learned some stuff here. I do miss. The big difference was when you were working in a newspaper, you could work on seven or eight different things, and that kind of was good for me because my mind worked like that. It was constantly. There's a story. I'll talk to him. I'll write that. Go there. When you're working on a television project, you're on one thing,
Jack Murray 20:41
and you're obsessed about, and you're obsessed about trying to get that out.
Ian Kehoe 20:43
Just that one thing,
Jack Murray 20:45
yeah.
Ian Kehoe 20:45
And you know, also in there, you're working late nights, two or three nights a week. And I was had a young family at the time, and so the opportunity to go to the business post, to go back,
Jack Murray 20:55
yeah,
Ian Kehoe 20:55
might have seemed strange, but to me, it made a lot of sense for where I was in my life and the stories that I wanted to write. And also, I felt there was real room. I'd gone off and learnt stuff, but there was real room for progression. So I went back there, and I think within two years I was the editor.
Jack Murray 21:09
Yeah, and that like you know you were a very young national editor at 34 years of age, and like I remember when the news came through, and I was reminding someone in the office during the week. I said, you know, we were so far ahead of ourselves. We had a media podcast 11 years ago, and I said one of our first guests. Yes, that's right. Yeah, you were in like you were in the first couple of weeks of the job. No, it wasn't actually. I think
Ian Kehoe 21:30
I turned you down for about six months because I said, I better, I better, I better do something. Yeah, you know, try and put some imprint upon it. And
Jack Murray 21:37
you weren't a wet week as editor when that, you know, crisis of that HSE story where. So my
Ian Kehoe 21:43
MY first edition. That was your first edition. My first edition. So for
Jack Murray 21:45
people who aren't aware, just give us a tiny bit of the background as to what the story was about and and the kind of the ethical journalism kind of pressure that came on you.
Ian Kehoe 21:52
It was. It was just actually, I was only thinking about it yesterday because on the wall in my office at home, I have kind of the the print plate of my very first edition as editor, and there's a picture of Colm Tobin, a great and a scorpion man. There's a picture of Richard Branson, but the story is about how the HSE was effectively rigging the waiting lists. It's written by Susan Mitchell, who was at the time and became over a number of years more so kind of the foremost health journalist in the country, and she was a special advisor in the Department of Health. After that, and it was basically based upon documents that Susan had obtained from different parts of the HSE, telling members to reallocate people so that they didn't appear on the waiting list. And anyway, we got the story out. I was knackered. I'd I'd been appointed editor. I knew it was coming for a week or two. No one else did, and it got announced on the Wednesday, and that was the very first splash that we put out on the Sunday. And then the phone lights up. Then I just wake up the next morning, and the phone lights up. The HSE are going apoplectic; they're demanding that the documents be released, which was a problematic for us because they were all individually named to different people. It wasn't a generic email, and it would have been pretty obvious who our sources were. And they were saying, "We want an apology. You have to produce it. You have to tell us where it came from. There was threats of corporate defamation. Doesn't exist, but anyway, there was threats of corporate defamation, and it was yeah quite a steep learning curve, and we held to our guns on it. We didn't give the documents, and
Jack Murray 23:30
they did their own investigation into it and found out that we were right. But it just shows kind of the power of the state when it comes after you. But it was a very interesting first week, interesting first five days, and it like it you know it's happened to you a couple times in your career when something new happens that it blows up in a way that is remembered. Those four years when you were in as editor, it is that notion of the poison chalice where you get all the power, you get all the responsibility. You're you're managing a national title, every problem comes to your desk. Structural issues, the paper not doing so well, the circulation kind of issues-all of that landed at your door. Must have been a lot of pressure.
Ian Kehoe 24:12
It was. I didn't. I think about it more now than I did at the time because at the time you're dealing with it on a day-to-day basis. So, you know, I was fortunate when I took the job. I had had a bit of management responsibility in the paper, so different sections, be it property or the markets and the business team, were reporting to me. So I was kind of building it up. I had a great deputy editor at the time, Pat Leahy. It's now at the Irish Times. Tom Lyons joined. Ian Guider joined. We brought in a good team. Jack Horgan Jones was there. You know, we had a we had a very strong team. We had good news editors, but it's a lot of issues. You're dealing with budgets, which I had never dealt with before. Remember, like the the finance director coming and goes, "This is how much you've got to spend, and I'm like, "Since when has this become a thing? You're. Dealing with HR issues, some of them are sensitive, and you're trying to navigate how you do that in a way, and that takes up more time than just simply sitting around, kind of what's our splash for this week, and you know, and the news was changing at the time in terms of, you know, the economy was struggling, papers were losing circulation, they were we were trying to get the place back on a profitable basis, which we did. You're also trying to migrate a number of people over to the digital product, try and get them to do that, which means investment.
Jack Murray 25:31
And you were kind of deep in the mire, and that's a bit like you know, changing the not changing the oil in the car, changing the engine in the car. Yeah, it was just upland cork and trying to keep everything.
Ian Kehoe 25:41
Yeah, there was there was there was a lot going on, but the one guiding star, and I know this sounds twee or whatever, but the one guiding star was to try and keep the emphasis on the journalism that you're producing. My strategy, and those were around me at the time, was if we can get the journalism product right, if we can tell the right stories, if we can do all of this, everything else will follow. I remember Paul Cook, who was one of the he had bought the paper along with Key Capital. Paul's now the president of the Football Association of Ireland, but he had a great phrase which was investment drives revenue. So if I could pitch him an idea, let's do this magazine, let's relaunch something else, and if he thought that investment in the product would drive revenue, he'd back it for better or for worse.
Jack Murray 26:26
And like, what was that like stress or contradiction like, where you were editing this premier national title, which was under business stress and strain? So you were out there reporting on business, and you were in the mire dealing with all sorts of issues to do with the business you were. Yeah,
Ian Kehoe 26:47
I was less concerned with the business. We we had been through a hell of a time in the Business Post prior to me becoming editor. It had gone through an examinership, you know. It had gone. It had sought bankruptcy protection from its creditors, it had been owned by Thomas Crosby Holdings. Their collapse and various things. The business post got left on its own. Paul Cook stepped in with Key Capital and bought it. So I knew there was an investment approach. They weren't just going to buy the paper and shut it down two years later. But at the same time, they wanted a return on their investment. And you know, you're suddenly you're on the board of the paper. You're turning up at the meetings. They're saying, "How's it going? And I'm talking about you know, we had this great story on such and such, and they're saying, "Yeah, but what are the circulation and what is your advertising revenue looking like? And it just it's a different it's a different model. It is very it's a very stressful job, and you know, even the the nature of it, you start on a Monday, you work till late on Friday night, you're in again on Saturday, you get the paper out, and then suddenly people are on the phone the next morning giving out about this or what about that or yeah.
Jack Murray 27:55
How do you cope with that when you have a small family and like you know your kids just want to fucking roll around on the ground with you and they don't care. Like, yeah,
Ian Kehoe 28:01
I, I suppose I was 34. You just, you roll with it. I had a lot more energy back then. Yeah. Now you roll with it, and but it was tough. But you can also see the dynamic of the industry changing firsthand. You know, and you become obsessed with numbers. So you're like, what's the circulation looking like? 30,000 was always the thing in my head. If our circulation goes below 30,000, I'm in trouble. And then you're looking at the digital. Have we got the right investment in it? Have we got the right team? People, you get a good journalist. Someone's always trying to poach them. Then you're trying to train somebody else up. And I remember just after
Jack Murray 28:40
that's hard, isn't it? It
Ian Kehoe 28:41
is, yeah.
Jack Murray 28:42
Because like you like great journalists solve massive problems. You know, you think, oh, there's three pages looked after, or there's a splash, or I can guarantee, I can, I you know, I can count on. I used to always think
Ian Kehoe 28:53
like Tom was great. You know, maybe like just we're short a splash, and he goes, leave it with me, and they'll come up with something, you know, or
Jack Murray 29:00
yeah, and you you know they would, and you know that you wouldn't have to stress about this. Yeah,
Ian Kehoe 29:04
exactly. But it's look, it is what I suppose. We were a small newspaper. I always thought the business post was plucky, like not with the resources ingrained of the Irish Times or Media House or as it is now or I and M. I thought we were plucky, and we kind of work together to try and get the best papers out that we possibly could. I possibly didn't put enough emphasis on digital at the time, okay, because I was very conscious that all of the money, the advertising revenue, the income streams, the vast majority of it, was coming from the paper, and that had to be preserved. And we had been through that sort of near-death experience of the examinership, and that very much focused my mind on helping the team and helping the commercial team get it back onto a profitable.
Jack Murray 29:49
So let's bring this up to the dawn of the of the currency, and like it's a it's an ill wind a wind that doesn't blow somebody good. So an awful lot of the formative experience or thought processes. You had brought you up to a moment where there was a chance that the management could have bought the business post as a title, and you guys tried to do that. At what point did you and Tom like? Did you think, okay, we want to go at this together? And you began looking at the numbers behind it.
Ian Kehoe 30:18
Yeah, we we did. Tom kind of took the lead on it because I was kind of, I was just key capital had put the the newspaper up for sale, and I was kind of going another owner. Here we go again. I'd been through it a couple of times, and I just went oh. And Tom was maybe there's a chance for us to do something here, and you know Tom had secured backers and things like that, and we were we had a pitch ready and we just couldn't make the numbers work for us. That's not to say other people and you were looking at legacy issues and you were looking at the legacy issues and things like that and we kind of just went. Actually, would you be better off just starting from scratch? Like, and you look at the founders at the Business Post who said some right. Let's do something from scratch, and we said if we were to look at the model and say, okay, if we don't have to print the paper, if we don't have to hire hundreds of van drivers to distribute it across the country,
Jack Murray 31:13
just deleting things off spreadsheets.
Ian Kehoe 31:15
Yeah, you know, if you don't have to do all of that sort of stuff, if you don't have to fix a legacy digital thing and build one from scratch. If you don't have to, if you can renegotiate a lease in a smaller place, and then you say, what are the things that can make this work? And we kind of went, well, what sells online subscriptions? Clearly, it was going to be online. That didn't even need to be a rocket scientist to figure that out to move it online. And the more we thought about it more. Tom and I kind of realised it was long-form premium journalism that people were signing up for online.
Jack Murray 31:48
Before we get into the depth of it, I want to bring you back to the spring of 2018, and you and I and Tom were part of the entrepreneurship experience. Yeah, a brilliant event that I've most recently went to last year in Ballymaloe, and the currency is involved in it as a media partner. And the inimitable Pete Smith from Broadway, and we were there that morning. And in that way, that Pete makes you feel incredibly uncomfortable. He decided that the way we were going to get in and know each other was hug each other. And you came towards me and said, I thought I'd be doing a lot of things today, but hugging you within the first 60 seconds wasn't one of them. And you were you were there, kind of in the cauldron of the idea. And I remember the three of us, you, me, and Tom, went for a drink, and we were chatting. And Media HQ was expanding at that point, and we were kind of excited, and like still to this day, like really admire you two guys. Always admire someone who's got the bravery to go and do it, but you were a long way pre-revenue at that stage, and you were kind of hammering it together. And I had that notion: these guys are mad, but I'm glad they are.
Ian Kehoe 32:53
Yeah, it was. It's funny again. You just kind of sometimes you jump into things.
Jack Murray 32:58
Yeah,
Ian Kehoe 32:58
you know my wife would support it, but sometimes you just jump into things and say, "Well, I have to do something, you know. After the business post, there was lots of things, and I decided I had had enough after four years. But there was other things I could have done. I could have gone to other titles, other broadcasters, different jobs. But I felt be interesting to try and do something on our own and to build something from scratch. And we felt there was a really opportunity there-a real opportunity, should I say? And then, as you mentioned, spreadsheets. Then we started looking at the numbers and saying, actually, can actually build something sustainable and profitable that allows you to invest in journalism much easier than trying to do something take over a different title. And kind of, so we kind of came up with just this idea, just the two of us. And actually, we went up to Broad Lake to Pete a number of times. We had lots of other people who helped us, like Michael Carey and Jerry Canelli, who would sit down and talk to us. You know, Tom's family were great, and we just said, "Let's go for this. So yeah, we didn't have free revenue. We didn't have anything. We were paying the rent of a small of a small little place out of our own pockets. So,
Jack Murray 34:01
so you put a you put an investment. You put some investment behind it. I know we got the runway. No, we got the investment. Yes, yeah. No, we
Ian Kehoe 34:07
raised we raised kind of some money, friends and family, and some supporters and things like that. And then the next thing is you have to go off and hire.
Jack Murray 34:14
And how long how long were you kind of building before the first before you went live?
Ian Kehoe 34:19
Okay, so I think I left the business post. I think in September, October. It was after the budget. I think Tom did another couple of months there, and we launched seven years ago this month.
Jack Murray 34:32
Okay.
Ian Kehoe 34:32
Now we would have been a little bit quicker, but we had a bit of a a diversion than the High Court for a couple of months in the middle of it through a legacy business post defamation case,
Jack Murray 34:42
and that was very stressful.
Ian Kehoe 34:43
That was really stressful. So yeah, Dennis O'Brien had taken a case against the business post.
Jack Murray 34:47
Tom had written a story about a PWC. Yeah, it was a big.
Ian Kehoe 34:50
It was kind of we had done five. Like we were all in. We had done five six pages on a kind of a a report that identified the biggest borrowers in the build up to the bank crash, and it was the. The report that convinced the government to guarantee the banks had never been published. We published it. It listed, you know, 32 names of the biggest borrowers. One of whom was Dennis O'Brien. He was a small part in the story. We noted he had paid all of his debts back. He sued, and this was there. This was there, lingering in the background for years. But as soon as we left, again, the business post under new ownership, the case reignited. Just it came to its turn to come up in the high court.
Jack Murray 35:32
17 days in the high court.
Ian Kehoe 35:33
17 days, which actually which actually seems short, but it's actually much longer. If you bear in mind, you know, it's really only three and a half days a week because they don't see it on a Monday and they close off early. So you're constant. It's very stressful. You're in and out every day. You're watching one and a half
Jack Murray 35:50
weeks or something. Yeah, and and like
Ian Kehoe 35:52
the longest defamation case in the history of the state.
Jack Murray 35:54
And like, was it very? It must have been terribly stressful. It
Ian Kehoe 35:57
it was.
Jack Murray 35:58
and there's also that thing where you're in the media every day, and there's the thrill of all of that. No, you're stretched. Actually,
Ian Kehoe 36:03
no. I there's no there's no thrill to it whatsoever at all.
Jack Murray 36:07
Okay,
Ian Kehoe 36:08
like you're walking in and out. You know, there's cameras there. It was very high profile. There's cameras there every day. Your photograph is there every day. Two or three times a week, it's on the front of of a paper. Your picture is there, and you're kind of, and you're in the weeds. You're kind of. We had a great legal team. We had John Doyle, Michael McTool, Shane English, representing us. But at the same time, it's your reputation is on the line, and in journalism, if you don't have that reputation, you have very little else. If you're caught out, you know, and a jury of your peers rules against you. It's very hard to come back from that.
Jack Murray 36:42
And there's a bit where it's very binary. Like if this works out and we win, it'll be great. But if it doesn't, it'll be terrible. Oh,
Ian Kehoe 36:47
it's it's exactly. I felt we had published the story in good faith. There was nothing wrong with the story, but it's what I found in the high court is embarrassers are great at this. Like they can pick on one little thing, and suddenly, and you're like, I didn't even think about that at the time. Yeah, and suddenly it's a massive thing, and suddenly that's what the whole case is about. It
Jack Murray 37:07
was a whole narrative around the
Ian Kehoe 37:08
whole narrative, and you're like, hang on, what? You know, where did this? It's just that struck me. You're kind of you're in the witness box, and I was in the witness box for five or six days, and you're like, hang on, what? And they're bringing up stuff that you had reported in 2004, and then on the televisions,
Jack Murray 37:24
where like I often wonder about that when you're in the witness box for so long, that like would you for even doubt your own name when you're under such scrutiny for so long that the pressure and you begin to
Ian Kehoe 37:34
think, hang on, did we do the right thing? Now, luckily enough, we had a we knew what we knew what we had done was correct. I was happy to stand over publishing the stories. Tom was happy to stand over writing them. Our lawyers backed us. We had there was a kind of a a libel insurer who underwrote it up to a certain point, and they were. It would have been easy for them to settle the case with an apology, and it would have been their call, but they didn't, so everyone went all in on it. And then, remember, on a Friday evening, the jury had been out for maybe a day, a day and a bit. And you're kind of sitting around. Everyone's milling around, and there's 30/40, journalists waiting around the court to see what's coming back. Hangers on friends, family, and they came back in, and I think within about two minutes, it was obvious we were on the right side of this one. The case was thrown out. The costs were awarded against Dennis O'Brien, and I remember just having Tom kind of pick ourselves together before you have to go out and stand on the on the gates of the forecourt and kind of answer questions. So yeah, it was a tough time. It kind of, on one hand, it it derailed the currency project a little bit, but it gave us a lot of credibility going forward.
Jack Murray 38:55
And talk to me about your relationship with Tom because you're both very strong characters. Relationships are built. Journalism relationships and business relationships are built, kind of, in the cauldron of pressure. And even if you look at that, that like those things either make or break a relationship. He runs the business, you run the editorial side, and he's a brilliant journalist. And talk to me about how that works day to day. And like, it's it's partnerships are hard. Partnerships,
Ian Kehoe 39:22
yeah, it's collaborative. You know, like someone needs to be in charge. You know, if you're, I'm in charge of editorial, working with Thomas Hubert. If it's all me, I'll just spend all the money and hire in more people, and I won't think about you know maybe advertising and stuff like that. It's kind of Tom's job while reporting, and I write as well. It's too small a team. It's 11 people. It's too small a team for people just to be saying I only do this or I only do that. I'll work on some of the business side. Tom will work on the editorial side. But you have to have some sort of some have to have some titles. And yeah, so it works.
Jack Murray 39:59
And. Let's just get into the the figures behind the business, and if you look at the company filings for for the business, profitable, very much in a niche, built a good subscriber base. The model is really interesting. So, really interested in the lessons from the business post, where it's a subscription model, where the value was served to the people, it's not based on advertising. Some of it is event based, and and and but but it's a it's a very niche business with a loyal readership, not on the news cycle on on quality journeys.
Ian Kehoe 40:34
Yeah, no, it's not on it's not on the news cycle. So we've been going seven years, as we said. At the end of this month, we've been profitable for six of them. The first year, obviously, you're carrying a lot of costs coming into it. 11 staff, we've close to 8000 members. We've touching on having published over that period 10,000 pieces with an average word count of about 1600 words, which is long compared to most. I suppose the idea that we had when we were setting it up, and it is niche. Sorry, and sorry, and you mentioned yes, we do events and we partner with companies and we do you know podcasts with other companies and professional services firms. We have a limited amount of advertising space, so we don't, you know, if you're paying a premium price, which we charge to read our product, we're not going to be bombarding you with glitzy advertising pop-ups and things like that, you know.
Jack Murray 41:33
So there's and the activations around kind of partnerships is that's kind of where the ad revenue comes from more than more than banner ads or anything like that. No, no,
Ian Kehoe 41:40
it's two ways. So, like, if you look on the site today, you know, there's an ad for Ballyfin, the hotel. There's an ad for Land Rover. They're premium partners. You know, there's an ad for LHK. They're all premium partners, and we're very conscious of who we work with. But we develop longer-term partnership with with those companies. So, for for example, Weirs or Keens, the jewelers, take ads for Patek Philippe watches, and they buy buy out a lot of our kind of our our weekend collateral, and that's great to have that there. Other companies we work with around events or partnerships or podcasts, but it's about being nimble.
Jack Murray 42:20
And if you look at who your ideal, like in in the SaaS business, we talk about you know ideal user profile and our ideal customer profile based on those brands. It's it's it's it's high income, it's money. Well, it like if you look at you know the one Ballyfin. Yeah, I know. Yeah, I'm just kidding. But by chance, they're the ones that are that are
Ian Kehoe 42:39
there. I suppose
Jack Murray 42:41
there's nothing wrong with that. There's nothing. No, I mean
Ian Kehoe 42:43
I think our ideal member. I was going to say it was going to be a bit glib and say someone who pays and the credit card doesn't bounce and stays with us. No, I think it's actually people who are interested in the pro in what we're writing about. Like you can do all the research, and we've done it all about who they are. You know what sort of cars they drive, or how much money they have, or what's their business worth. I think it's people who are curious about business. It's primarily. It's
Jack Murray 43:08
okay to say it's like it's funny. It's okay to say it's a niche. It's a niche. It is a niche, and but but it's a profitable niche. Yeah, it's a
Ian Kehoe 43:14
sorry. Like
Jack Murray 43:15
yeah,
Ian Kehoe 43:15
there's not
Jack Murray 43:16
yeah
Ian Kehoe 43:16
like there's nothing wrong with being a niche.
Jack Murray 43:18
Yeah,
Ian Kehoe 43:19
like I think we're going to have. I've thought a lot about it from my more recent stints in RTE, but I've thought a lot about it about what sort of the media outlook looks like, and I think we're going to have a small number, a very small number, of very large media organisations, and a large number of small media organisations servicing their niche, and that's actually refreshing. So if you think about what we do, okay. There are certain things we might have to cover, say the budget, or you know, big company announcements, or something like that. But if you can go in and not have to worry about the day-to-day news flow, that river of content that's constantly coming out on so many sites, and they have to do it because they're full service. If you don't have to worry about that, you can purely focus on the quality content of the stuff where you think you can make a real profound difference, or do it in a better way.
Jack Murray 44:07
Talk to me about talent development. I've been watching with interest kind of the people you've appointed, and I thought Alan English is was a great appointment. I love Dionne Fanning, and you know you've you've been very good at how you pick columnists. You know, the late great Tommy Gorman, people like that.
Ian Kehoe 44:27
Sam Sam Smith. Sam Sam Smith. Like one, what a
Jack Murray 44:30
legend Sam Smith is. One of the first people when I was a young fella in Leinster House, and like was absolutely starstruck. Sam Sam came in and like I remember going home and saying to one of my friends, Sam Smith was kind to me today. Like and like I was like 10 foot tall. Talk talk to me about it. Like you've made some very clever moves around. We talked about talent earlier on. That like talented journalists build relationships. That that whole media strand that Alan English does. He did a piece on John Morin and Limerick earlier in the year, but giving him time and space to produce quality.
Ian Kehoe 45:06
You see, good journalists want that. No one wants to be going in, sitting at a desk and being told that they have to bang out seven stories over the course of a day. It's journalism by spreadsheet, and we have a strategy if we can hire good journalists, and you can build ones, you know, I'm thinking Alice Chambers is with us. She has grown and developed. You know, Alan English, on the other hand, was a national newspaper editor. Francesca Cummin, who joined us from day one, is kind of outstanding in the area of legal affairs. I don't want to name everybody because I don't want to be leaving people out. I think it's a balance. I think any good newsroom you've got a number of experienced people who are experts in their field who can bring something different or a different voice. But you also need to bring people through and up through the system because otherwise you're leaving nothing behind.
Jack Murray 45:59
And there's been a like-is it a conscious decision in the last couple of years towards like the move towards like more audio content, and then you've like you have strong people on the team who can do both now, and that notion of we're in the attention economy now. So if it's a 3000 read, sometimes you know the podcast that Alan might do or Dion might do. Will will will audio is
Ian Kehoe 46:24
audio is a tough one. You know, told a lot about it. When we started off, you know, we were doing a business podcast a week, and so it's hard to know are people listening to it, are they engaging, do they want to read the article as well? So our pod, our kind of audio strategy is one: if we do a podcast, we will write an article that goes with it, and that gives people who don't want to sit down and listen to the podcast, or who just want to read the article or go through for the salient points, the opportunity to do that. But the podcast is attached to the article, so you always get two for the price of one. We've pushed the audio strategy away from just, you know, a weekly podcast on business or something like that to a more tailored, bespoke offering. So we might do a series. So Alison Kauser, businesswoman and entrepreneur, has done a number of series around branding, marketing, franchising, and they're all self-contained. You know, seven, eight episodes, and they all have a corporate sponsor. I've done a couple on sports, sports matters, where I look at that intersection of business and sports. Again, it'll have a sponsor, and we might do an event at the end of it that goes along with it. A lot of what we do in terms of the podcast are are around the weekend at the moment, where it's kind of we can see the spike where people are listening more. They're out for walks. They're on the sideline of a pitch. They're watching their kids play sport. They're bringing them off to ballet or something, or to dancing or anything, karate, and they're they're listening. So there's that more of an opportunity to listen to a more discursive kind of interview, be it with an artist, an author, an academic, an opinion maker.
Jack Murray 48:07
What and look, this is the the six mark question, but like about the future and and what comes next. And in the media era now, we we live in an era where Gen A Gen AI is you know eating the world. Yeah, the recent story in Kenny's in Galway, where they're buying 10,000 titles and burning the books quite literally, the paywall thing where you know it's it's difficult. I was able to before I came in here today, just to last bit of research I did was like tell me what the currency's been writing about in the last two weeks, and it gave me a full summary of what's been going on since the 18th of August. A lot of illegal copyright infringement going on by Gen AI for content that's
Ian Kehoe 48:45
absolutely
Jack Murray 48:46
you know it's conceived, it's commissioned, it's paid for, and then these guys are ingesting it. What's what's going to happen to the business model? Like like where do you think it's going to go? Where like I know in my business, it's it's going to go from oh I got that piece of coverage too. I came first, and the and the prompt.
Ian Kehoe 49:04
Myself and Tom were over at a a business journalism conference in Istanbul about this time last year, and there was two key points that came out of it. One was that AI and Gen AI was going to kill journalism, and the other one was that it was going to save journalism. And I don't know the answer. It's you know it's on one hand it allows you to do research in a way and you know to to understand things in a way that has never happened before. On the other hand, it's the wild west in terms of copyright infringement, in terms of everything being taken from your site, you know whether you want to or not. Maybe the paywall will help. Maybe it won't. The moment we seem to be doing okay, something we're always monitoring. The bigger question I would have is: It's grant. It's a virgin product at the moment. What? In two years' time, so and it's been based around what I'm writing, based around what other people are writing, kind of established figures or whatever else. If we stop doing it because there's no market there, where is it going to start to learn from in terms of this profession? I think look, I think it has immense opportunities, immense potential for doing things in a different way, but at the same time, it has immense capacity to undermine the business models, and those business models are changing even over the last two or three years.
Jack Murray 50:29
Be nice if they stop stealing stuff as well. Well, that's the big point, you know. Yeah, like it's funny. The Guardian opted out of the copyright framework in the UK, and like they just ingest newspapers. Jenny, I was just ingesting newspapers whole. You alluded to this a couple of moments ago about returning to RTE, and that happened in 2018 on the board. And my simple question to you on the tumultuous like number of years on the RTE board: when you look at it now, was it a mistake to go on the RTE board?
Ian Kehoe 51:01
I think it's easy to turn around and say, "Well, if I knew then what I knew now, I certainly didn't think it would turn out to be as high profile. I didn't think it would be as controversial. I didn't think it would cause difficulties for how I was working with my own business when it was all going on, but if everybody took those decisions not to go on state boards, I think that's a bigger problem. Like I look back upon it, and I was kind of too central to the whole thing. You know, I was deputy chair. I was on the board on the the audit and risk committee when this was all going on, and it's a very stressful time for me, but it was a stressful time for the currency as well because you know they're writing about it on a day-to-day basis. I couldn't be in the office because I'm getting calls. What are we doing? That was that was tough, and kind of the impact that that had upon Tom and the rest of the team. That was difficult. Had I gone off the board eight months before, there wouldn't have been a problem. It was just that was the tail end of my tenure when all of this started to happen. When I look back upon it, I kind of went. At times, I kind of go, "What was it all about? You know, yes, clearly things went wrong. The board, as soon as it found out, through actually checks and balances, leaned into it pretty quickly. Didn't trying to cover anything up and published details of everything. I'm proud of that, but yeah, it did have an impact. It was again another seemed to limber from stressful occasions to more stressful occasions. But I feel for the people in in my own organization that was tough for them.
Jack Murray 52:41
Like I'd recently read Shane Ross's book, which, in wonderful Shane Ross fashion, is highly entertaining. But like my one takeaway from from Ross's book when I read it was this is an institution that since it started has, you know, has had difficulties all the way along, and many good-minded people have gone in. People from business, people from media have gone in to try and serve to improve it. Yeah. And lots of people, like lots of good people, have gone in there and kind of, and not not that this is what happened to you, but lots of good people went in there, and you know the institution got the better of them, and they did. Yeah, I
Ian Kehoe 53:18
think I actually think RTE gets too cops too much flat. I'm from being there's there's lots wrong with it, but there's lots right with it as well. We grow up in this country. I don't know if you were able to access it. I certainly could on the on the east coast, where the BBC is in everybody's house.
Jack Murray 53:43
I used to call when I went to my cousins in Greystones. I was amazed at what they could say. Yeah, exactly. You know,
Ian Kehoe 53:48
we had s4 C. I was kind of half fluent in Welsh for a while, but we grow up watching and listening to the BBC. The BBC is the best broadcaster in the world, bar none. Has its own challenges and its own issues, but the quality of what they put out-be it news, current affairs, drama, everything else, game shows-is the best in the world. And RTE is competing against that. If we didn't have the BBC looking at everyone becoming going, RTE is literally one of the best broadcasters in terms of what they put out on the radio, the podcasts, the documentaries, the cultural aspect, the drama, but we're basing it against the behemoth and the best. And I think people forget that at times. And I also think the number of people have said to me over the years, "Oh God, that thing, that program that you know, RTE investigates it, or that documentary, or Kane, or whatever that was worth the price of the license fee alone. I said, "Well, why didn't you pay your license fee? But that-that's my view. I think it gets a-it cops more flack than it should because it's high profile and it's one of those institutions of state, like the Catholic Church or the GAA or Fianna Fail. And people kind of look at it like that, not to say that there's not a lot wrong, but there's I think there's more right than wrong.
Jack Murray 55:06
To finish today, a rapid fire round.
Ian Kehoe 55:08
Oh God!
Jack Murray 55:09
Quick answers only allowed. No, no, no. So number one, what one media moment has changed how you work?
Ian Kehoe 55:19
You said no, no slow answers. This is a slow answer. I look at. I think going into the currency online only and just thinking about that as opposed to everything else.
Jack Murray 55:29
Number two, give me one example of something that failed that you learned from.
Ian Kehoe 55:35
I made a documentary many years ago. I won't say which one it was on? Because I don't want to get other people in, but it was really bad, and I went. God, it was too vain, glorious in my own sense. I was in every scene. I was everywhere. Sometimes you're better off just taking a step back.
Jack Murray 55:51
What's one universal belief about public relations that you think is wrong or overstated?
Ian Kehoe 55:59
What do you mean by that?
Jack Murray 56:00
So something that everybody believes about public relations, but you don't think it's true-that t
Ian Kehoe 56:05
hey're untrustworthy-and I don't think that's true. There's a number of them untrustworthy, but I think more often than not, I think they want to try and help.
Jack Murray 56:13
Give me one piece of advice that you'd wish you'd heard earlier in your career.
Ian Kehoe 56:18
Don't be afraid to move.
Jack Murray 56:21
What book do you think everyone in your job should read? God,
Ian Kehoe 56:27
ah, I'm actually it's it's it's it's a book, and I'll get you the name of it.
Jack Murray 56:33
Yeah,
Ian Kehoe 56:33
it's a book that Thomas Uber gave me and everybody in the office, and it's about style guides.
Jack Murray 56:39
Okay,
Ian Kehoe 56:40
about I'm I'm not talking like we landed in the show. It'd be easy. It'd be easy to come in and say all the president's men or something like that. But no, if you can, the most important thing that you want when copy comes in is that it's clean, and that the commas are in the house style, and that the percent sign is in the house style. Yeah. So that's.
Jack Murray 56:58
And finally, this is the first time we've asked this last question in the rapid fire round: Who's your favourite journalist and why?
Ian Kehoe 57:08
I'm going to go with Sam. I think I'm going to go with Sam Smith because I think if you look at the body of his work over 3040, 50 years, you know he's almost like this Forrest Gump character who seems to turn up in the big moment of all of the major national scandals. But I throw in, I would throw in Cliff Taylor in as well.
Jack Murray 57:33
Thanks for joining me today, and that was a fascinating conversation. Great to spend time with you,
Ian Kehoe 57:37
and you too, Jack. Thank you.
