During an extensive interview with Browne, we took the chance to explore his career to date. Here Browne discusses how he got into journalism, the news organisations and editors he worked for and how at times he would subversively challenge the institutional pressures of the mainstream media.

[HB - Harry Browne, MC - Miriam Cotton, MediaBite]

MC: Could you outline your career in journalism, what brought you into it – the highs and the lows?

HB: Journalism was something that I always wanted to do. I grew up in the states and never studied journalism there and never worked professionally as a journalist there – apart from making a little family newspaper when I was six years old. When I was in college – Harvard – there was a daily newspaper – a very good one but the hoops you had to jump through to get in it and the egos you had to deal with were fierce! I instead was an editor on the literary magazine in college rather than on the hard news journalistic side – which was some sort of indication of the path I was going to take. I also was in training to be a professional historian – I got a couple of degrees in history but eventually moved to Ireland and started working in the alternative press while also typesetting and working as a printer in the late 80s - and went from there to Microsoft, where I worked as an editor on documentation for about a year.

I completed the one year post graduate course in journalism at Dublin City University (DCU) in 1990 and went straight to The Irish Times. Initially on work placement - but basically I never left. I was freelancing initially in The Irish Times but freelancing eight hours a day, five days a week , from the beginning – writing in all areas of the paper, in news and in features. Primarily in my first few months, when the placement had worked its way out I was both writing and sub-editing in the Friday supplement which was aimed at the workplace and training – it was the original ‘let’s find an excuse to package the recruitment ads into some kind of supplement form’. It was the first of these very commercially oriented regular supplements. mPretty early on I had a view of the relationship between the advertising and the editorial side of papers - these two sides that are allegedly completely and absolutely separated - but in reality of course it’s not the case. An awful lot of editorial decisions are made on the basis of what might make an attractive setting for advertising.

I eventually got a contract to be a production editor on the Saturday supplement and moved from there into a permanent job as the production editor on the Education and Living supplement on Tuesdays - that came in about 92/93. It was really while I was working in production that I tried to find various writing outlets within the paper – the writing that I did in the Times from 93/94 onwards was essentially nixing. My job was commissioning and producing education material for the most part. I was later what is called the desk editor on the education supplement. All that time I was often reviewing in theatre and film - and writing about television. Finally I got to do a new gig in about 94/95 - a radio review column which had been pioneered wonderfully by Michael Cunningham.  He wasn’t the original of the species but he had certainly made it quite wonderful. Helen Meaney had done it for a time. Of course I loved radio and care very much about it but also radio is where so much happens in Ireland that to talk about it without talking about the issues which are ventilated and framed there – and the role that it has in framing them - would seem to me to be a pointless exercise.

All the time that I was at the Times in the mainstream media I was aware of myself as a slightly alien being. I knew that I was in, but not of, the institution. I used to very self-consciously log myself in every day with a password that was a variation on Noam Chomsky’s name so that I would remember all the time that I was part of a machinery that had all sorts of built in biases and that I had to watch out for my own sense of myself to not give myself over to those things. One of the exciting things about writing about them in the radio column was that I felt it was a slightly subversive place where I could raise questions about media behavior – and from the inside. I think the Chomskys of the world are obviously extremely valuable but a big part of my task was to demystify media processes. I was sometimes viewed as a bit of a craft traitor – I was giving guilty secrets away. I can remember hearing back from some subeditors that they had a big laugh on the desk one night because in the course of one particular column in the radio review I had slagged off not only RTE, the commercial structures of so-called independent broadcasting in Ireland but also - by name - four of my Irish Times colleagues. They were wondering ‘how long can this guy go on?’ People often asked ‘how do you get away with that?’ The column was reasonably popular, the feedback was generally good so I was let carry on like this. Decreasingly so towards the end. Everybody knows that the dot.com bubble burst about 2000/1 and then 9/11 came along and recruitment advertising dropped quite considerably. The Irish Times had just invested in a new printing press and the found themselves in a sudden financial crisis and at the end of 2001/2 redundancies were offered and I took one in the summer of 2002.

MC: Was there a suggestion that you should go?

HB: No, not at all. But they were trying to get a lot of people to go – so there was no ideological sensibility about it.  Remember this was about my day job – it wasn’t about my column. My day job at the IT had nothing to do with that public face, they thought that they could give me a redundancy on the day job and keep me on as a columnist which is exactly what they did.  In as much as I was encouraged to go it was generic, I don’t think it was personal. But within a year of that I was let go from the column as well and that certainly followed a number of political conflicts that I was having – not with Geraldine Kennedy personally but with mid-management editorial staff within the institution - just before my 40th birthday after 13 years of always being able to say ‘Harry Browne from the Irish Times’. It was an extraordinary institutional affiliation– it carried credentials and I had suddenly lost that.  I mean, I was on my feet with lecturing in journalism with DIT [Dublin Institute of Technology];  I wouldn’t make a martyr of myself.  I had picked up the lecturing very soon after taking the redundancy. Since that time I’ve still been able to do some interesting journalistic work and not have to worry too much about whether it paid and so that’s been a real gift. One of many gifts: teaching; being around young people all the time and being able to do research are among the others. There are obviously a lot of headaches in any institution but getting out of the journalistic institution of The Irish Times and being able to broaden my journalistic horizon beyond the education desk where I had been for quite some time at that point was an absolute gift. So, while I harbor some resentment about losing my column in the Irish Times – resentment is too strong a word, I certainly at the time felt aggrieved and hurt and I did take it up with Geraldine Kennedy and had absolutely no joy whatsoever.  I feel in retrospect that absolutely it was the best thing – a new lease of life for me to not be in The Irish Times. I was lucky, leaving aside what I was doing as a teacher, The Evening Herald picked me up right after I left the IT in 2004 – there was a presidential election on in America and I was in a position to write about that for the Herald that year. So I was able to try my hand at writing for a different kind of audience and publication with a different approach and a different style – writing for a tabloid.

MC: A bit like Pilger in the Mirror?

HB: Yes, although I’m no John Pilger - but Pilger in the Mirror would have been a model. Or Eamon McCann, when he used to write in The Sunday World.  I think again it’s absolutely the place to be in a popular newspaper. Obviously The Evening Herald is not more popular than The Irish Times in terms of the number of people who pick it up every day but it reaches a possibly more open-minded bunch of people than the IT does. It was very exciting to do that and I returned to that this year during the American election and one or two things beside the election too and I have to say the experience that I have had in 2002/3 with a lot of political headaches coming from editors in The Irish Times was never repeated in The Evening Herald, which is part of the Independent Group which there are a lot of reasons to be concerned about because it dominates the market.  I remember once writing about John Kerry that he was related by marriage to this newspaper because he was married to Theresa Heinz – who had obviously been involved with Tony O’Reilly of the Heinz company in the states. O’ Reilly is chair of INM which owns the Herald – and that got cut alright. But it was only a throw-away remark – it didn’t appear when I picked up the paper the next day. So, it’s not the case that I could say anything I wanted in the Herald. I’m sure if I had proposed a story about why Tony O’Reilly is a danger to freedom of the press,  they would have said ‘you know Harry, not this week’. At the same time I was given a pretty free hand and I appreciated it. Village came along after that and clearly I had a very free run there as well. So, I’ve been very lucky as a journalist.

To read the full interview please follow this link.