Ken Early – co-host of the Second Captains podcast, columnist for The Irish Times and… Editor of Misc. in 1999 – speaks with Phoebe Pascoe, Misc.’s current Editor. 

PP: Could you tell me about your experience editing Misc?

KE: I suppose I look back on it with a bit of shame that I didn’t really do a very good job. But it was interesting to do something where I had no idea what I was doing. It was only really afterwards that I was like ‘Oh, I should have done this, I should have done that’. As I got more experienced I realised that I actually did everything wrong. So from that point of view, I wouldn’t say you should really check out these back issues, they’re so good. There is some interesting stuff in it. It was certainly a worthwhile thing to do, which probably had quite a lot of influence on the rest of my life, actually, in terms of what I ended up doing – not that that was obvious at the time. 

PP: I saw in an interview you talked about a piece you wrote for Misc. calling Amazon.com a bad investment – you said it was one of the worst pieces you’ve written. Do you think there’s something to be said for getting some potentially bad pieces out the way as a student, and making mistakes? Also, do you have a favourite piece that you wrote? 

KE: I really can’t remember the pieces I wrote, aside from the Amazon one – that obviously sticks in the mind. I think I actually was right in the short term. But, if I had just got a job in McDonalds and put my two weeks of money into Amazon then I’d be a very rich person now. I think in the larger sense I was wrong. I remember writing something about the Belgrade bombing, saying I thought it was very bad. Actually I think that was right, I think it was bad. I see it now being used by Russia to justify what they’re doing: You did this and it was bad so we should get to do it as well. I can’t remember the details of what I was saying but that was the thrust of it. 

But mainly I was editing it in the sense of getting other people to write things and also I did all the design and layout – the production part of it – which was also a bit of a nightmare. Again, because of my disorganised work approach I would end up having to do it all in 48 hours. After you do that a couple of times you sort of develop a phobia of having to do it again. Which might explain the low numbers of issues we produced! 

The first one that we did, I remember I had taken so long over laying everything out, it was like my little baby. Then I sent it off to the printer and they just sent back this total jumble. All of the fonts were wrong, everything had gone wrong. There were pieces missing, articles cut. It was just the grossest… I hesitate to use the word abortion but it was an abortion. That was the first one we did, so that was disappointing. I was really happy with that, I was like “This is great, everyone’s worked so hard, I think we’ve got some good articles”, then it came back and I was just looking at it like this deformed thing and I was like oh my god. And then there was an argument with the printer… So that wasn’t a great start! But at least the layout worked on the other ones we did. 

PP: I think the whole doing it in 48 hours layout scenario is still kind of a mainstay of student publications – I don’t think that’s changed too much. Now that you’re not strictly an editor, how much do you edit what you write? Especially with sports journalism, that must have a quick turnaround, so do you edit what you write a lot or are you more of a ‘first draft is the final draft’ kind of writer?

KE: I’ve always been like that because ever since I left college I’ve always worked in a day-to-day-to-day sort of journalism, whether it be on the radio or writing stuff for the papers it’s always been for the next day. It’s almost never done anything which requires a longer term approach… 

PP: You often incorporate lots of references to TV shows, pop culture etc into your writing, is there journalism (aside from news) that you enjoy reading that is outside of the remit of what you write? Is there a particular writer or kind of writing you find yourself drawn to? 

KE: Well now, not particularly. It’s sort of changed so much since I was in college. We did have the internet, but like, it wasn’t like the internet is now. I mean, I think Google maybe existed, but nobody used it at that stage. It was like AltaVista or Yahoo. You know, those search engines that wouldn’t really give you much. There wasn’t anything like the way now, if you hear about anything, you can just look it up and you expect it to be there on the Internet. It was completely different. Some of the papers had started putting up their stuff online for free – everybody was doing it for free then, because it wasn’t sort of taken seriously, it was just like, oh, yeah, we have a website, we’ll throw stuff up there, nobody looks at that. So nobody really understood what was going to happen. But I kind of feel as though it’s completely changed everything to do with journalism. I mean, say back when I was in Trinity, the interesting journalists then would have been what was called the New Journalism. In the sixties, like Tom Wolfe, he was leading this movement of a new kind of journalist that doesn’t want to write the dry, boring prose of the style that newspapers think journalism should be written in, instead we’re going to use novelistic techniques and sort of bring ourselves into the story and do all this stuff which would have been regarded sort of sniffily by the New York Times or any of the kind of establishment papers.That was the kind of cool type of journalism then. I kind of don’t see that now. Maybe you would know better than I would. Who’s doing that now?

It’s not as though journalism was really respectable as long ago as the 1990s, but it wasn’t  hated. You know, like the slogan they have:you don’t hate the media enough. You’ll see Elon Musk or whoever:“You don’t hate them enough.” It’s become identified, I think, in a lot of people’s minds, the word journalist, with what they now call “legacy media”, and a lot of people kind of conflate that with essentially a kind of a propaganda outrider for the government or for the elites or for the establishment or whatever the evil force is. As opposed to the idea that I would have grown up with which is that the independent media is separate from power and actually can critique it, and in fact does do that, and, or at least tries honestly to do that.

At least in a lot of cases, because we also had obviously the tabloid or what they might call popular media – popular meaning more people actually read it – which would just be about which footballer is having an affair,that kind of thing, which obviously people have always been interested in. But there was that sense of the media as a serious project with at least some people with integrity in it who were trying to find out things or better understand or explain the world.

I honestly think that idea is completely gone now. And the way that people consume information has completely changed. I used to think, wow, great, and sit down and read a 6, 000 word article. Do people do that now? I mean, I know that obviously some people do, but generally, it’s kind of 15 second videos, I mean, it’s obvious that that’s a far more dominant way of communication than it is now and the people who are successful in media are the people who understand or are good exponents of this style.

PP: I guess the way that you were describing those changes in the media in the past kind of 25 years, do you kind of have any changes that you predict now going forward, do you think maybe the pendulum will swing the other way as a kind of response by “legacy media” to try and kind of regain the faith of readers and that kind of thing or do you think that it’s maybe All just kind of going in the same direction 

KE: No, I don’t see any way that it can be. I suppose there’s always gonna be a market for, say, what the Financial Times does. The Financial Times is an extremely successful so-called “legacy media” organization with a vast subscriber base because they actually are telling people something about reality; if you’ve got money, if you’re rich, you will want to know what other rich people are doing, what’s happening. And the Financial Times is doing this in a way which people still find credible enough to pay them in, in large numbers. And the New York Times, I guess, is sort of the same, it’s a kind of a broader entity than FT. But we’re talking about some of the biggest newspaper brands in the world. For everybody else I really don’t know. 

I think it’s going to be interesting over the next couple of years the way you saw during the US Presidential campaign Trump just started doing podcast interviews with all these guys like Theo Von and whoever. And this, I think, was a pretty successful strategy by him. He’s always kind of been more interesting media-wise than whoever he’s been running against. But yeah, it was a good idea because they recognised that these things have much bigger audiences and bigger reaches than what we have previously been conditioned to think of as the biggest media.

What I think is going to be interesting to see over the next couple of years is to see […] how long before people start to kind of realise that this is the propaganda now, this is the form that it’s taken. How long can his sort of appeal survive? People are going on about the legacy media, CNN, they lie, they lie so much… But Rogan is just sitting there just listening to these billionaires talk about how great they are and just going “wow”. It’s far worse. Previous generations of propagandists wouldn’t have dared to try this; it just would have seemed too ridiculous. But somehow he’s still managing, so far, to be like, “Oh, you know, he’s not like the legacy media or whatever, he’s got integrity.” I’m like, “I don’t think so!” And it will be interesting over the next couple of years, all of this sort of right wing podcast sphere, which has grown up as a reaction to the previously established media and has kind of been like, “We’re not like them.” If they’re all now just cheering on The United States government and the richest billionaires in America and talking about how great this all is, how long can that last before people start to go “Hang on a second, are you not actually even worse than what went before you?” At least they made the pretense of having editorial standards.

Maybe it was hypocritical, but at least if they got caught out doing something, somebody might get fired. Instead, I hear people say stuff about Rogan like, “Well, he’s not a journalist, he’s a podcaster.” It’s as though that exonerates him from having to have any sort of standards of integrity.

I don’t know, this may in time seem like a very old fight – this may be as good as my Amazon prediction, you know, are people not gonna notice at some point that this is like an even more insidious propaganda form? I’m not sure. Maybe people just find it entertaining and it’s what they want to hear.

PP: I agree. I think it’ll be interesting as the alternative becomes kind of assimilated into the government and becomes, I guess, the mainstream view. 

KE: And what does the reaction to that look like? I kind of shudder to think in a way.

PP: I guess given all of that and how extreme that sphere can be, do you have advice for people entering journalism now? I mean, a lot of people’s response to that is just don’t. 

KE: No, I mean, it’s obvious there’s a good living to be made, you know, lots of people are doing it. I don’t know if it’s what we would call, what we used to call journalism. Like a primarily written form. Because writing used to be the way that information was transmitted at large scale, and if you wanted to read something you had to buy that thing first, whether it was a newspaper or book or whatever it was a physical object that you had to buy so there was like a, there was a kind of a revenue stream purely associated with the writing. Now I guess there’s Substack. I mean, it can still be done, but it’s a bit harder. I suppose people can build Substack profiles out of anywhere just by being consistently good. If you consistently write really interesting things then people will eventually notice. That’s true. But it is harder to get noticed than if you were, for instance, hired by a newspaper and your stuff appeared there alongside everyone else’s and people would see it and go this is good. It’s just hard. How do you kind of get over that initial hurdle of people knowing who you are unless you have some other pre-existing fame or some other way of getting noticed. I mean the idea that someone like me could understand what someone now should do honestly is ridiculous. I have absolutely no idea. The one thing that I wish that I had done is pay more attention to the people around me, when I was [at Trinity]. Some of the people who were doing articles for me, I thought were actually really good. And I never even thought to bring them out for drinks or something. You know what I mean? These kind of stupid, simple things. Like, why did I do that? It just didn’t occur to me. That’s the only thing that I would say – some of these people actually might grow up to be important, you know. I’m not just talking about human respect and empathy; it could serve you later in later life. Like Leo Varadker wrote a couple of things for Miscellany. He interviewed Bernard Ingham, who was Mrs. Thatcher’s press secretary. Rory Hearne, who’s a TD now. I mean, it’s the nature of being at Trinity: a lot of the people who are there will, in 20 years time, be kind of running the country. Maybe you should pay attention to them while they’re there, instead of just thinking about yourself all the time like I did. 

PP: Do you think that experience in student journalism is in any way a preparation for then working as a journalist? Or do you think it’s a different entity entirely, just getting to make things with people that are around you and your friends etc?

KE: I think it is definitely a preparation. I mean, just the whole thing of working in a group with other people, working in a kind of a collective project. Also the fact that you’ll meet a lot of those people again – if you continue to work in media, you’ll probably run into these people because they obviously have a similar interest to you at that point, so you’re kind of starting out going in the same direction. So yeah, for all of these reasons, I definitely look back at it as something I’m glad I did. I just wish that I’d done a better job. 

PP: I feel like by any measure you probably did do a good job… But thank you so much for answering all of my questions!