Aengus Fanning R.I.P

Lapin

Following a brief ilness

http://www.independent.ie/national-news/sunday-independent-editor-aengus-fanning-dies-2990591.html

PCPhoto

RIP (Didn't know him but know colleagues of his)

Father Damo

He said Mr Fanning was possibly the greatest and most instinctively brilliant editor that Irish journalism has ever produced.

I have never been one to abide by the "speak ill of the dead" rule.

Nor shall I start.

Personally he may have been a nice guy, god knows, but he overseen years of garbage by the the UK and Irelands worst newspaper (I say that because I have no idea if there is a foreign language publication worse than the Sindo, but there certainly is not one in our catchment area). That paper is muck, and there is no excusing ridicilous soundbites like the above quoted comment. There will be unflattering profiles when Rupert Murdoch croaks it, I dont see why this should see otherwise. FFS they accused Liam Lawlor of one of the few scandals he actually hadnt commited.

Bill Shock

Gavin O'Reilly's predictable gushing hyperbole is sickening.

Fanning oversaw a rag that was populated with a coterie of some of the most ignorant and arrogant second-rate hacks you would find anywhere. Their base level of "journalism" was actually an insult to the profession and their policy of deliberately writing intrusive and often malicious rubbish against targetted people in Irish society was disgraceful (the late Terry Keane being a prime example).

Fanning's passing can only be good for irish journalism.

IRE60

Bill Shock wrote: »

Fanning's passing can only be good for irish journalism.

A fairly sh1t thing to say, fairly reprehensible actually.

mike65

Fanning knew what sold and was happy to sell it, he made the Sindo a money machine which governments took notice of. Middle Ireland in newsprint.

coylemj

He has to take the rap for the garbage that they produced under his leadership. Given that his partner Anne Harris has been deputy editor for as long as I can remember, I don't see that anything will change very soon and I imagine that the O'Reillys will not tamper with a (commercially) successful formula.

Bigcheeze

coylemj wrote: »

I imagine that the O'Reillys will not tamper with a (commercially) successful formula.

I think you'll see Denis O'Brien use his leverage in the next appointment. Fanning/Harris must be very tight with the O'Reillys to last so long.

Stavro Mueller

While I'm sorry for his family and friends, it can't be left unsaid that he was the editor of a particularly repellent rag. My parents still buy it, more because the choice of Irish Sunday newspapers is so poor than out of a love of it. I accept that no newspaper is neutral but the bias in the Sindo is incredible. For example, it lived up the arse of Bertie Ahern during the boom and cheerled the property bubble. A recent issue (either last Sunday or the Sunday before) was plastered with articles urging people to start buying again. They can't stop printing articles about Van Morrison or scantly clad society figures that nobody has ever heard of outside of D4. I'm sure nothing will change and more's the pity.

Gekko

Bigcheeze wrote: »

I think you'll see Denis O'Brien use his leverage in the next appointment.

I don't think there are too many fans of DO'B amongst SIndo staff and writers, some of whom I know,...but it'll be interesting to see what happens nonetheless.

IRE60

O'B wont get a look in at the next appointment - not even a sniff. Thats down to the day to day mgt, who in turn were all appointed in the last reign. Anyway, given the stick the paper gave O'B and Co it will be interesting. (plus, he might understand light commercial radio - but his opinions on appointing an editor would fall on deaf ears - we know it won't be Sammy!!)

They have Noreen Heg who returned for the stewardship of the Trib, a few internal people - also Colm McGuinty in the SW- who was the Dep Ed there for years.

Interesting times

Rebelheart

I hope that individual never rests in peace.

And I make no apologies for that. Fanning was a complete bastard. He was the gutter in gutter journalism, the worst, most crass and most agenda driven editor this state has ever known.

He was the chief minion of Anthony O'Reilly, whether that involved talking up O'Reilly's companies, challenging the government if it refused O'Reilly's business requests, praising the government when it granted O'Reilly's business requests, or talking down companies (like Eircom) that O'Reilly wanted to buy at a cheaper price.

Aengus Fanning was a thug bullying all and sundry who did not subscribe to the anti-Irish/pro-british agenda of O'Reilly. He censored stories which challenged that agenda. He gave that oxygen of publicity to some of the most obnoxious, mentally unstable anti-Irish rightwing nutjobs society has produced: Harris, Arnold, Dudley-Edwards, Cruise O'Brien, O'Hanlon, Myers. In fact, has a single person of integrity worked for that rag?

Fanning destroyed so many lives. He dehumanised so many decent people whose crime was that they didn't subscribe to the rightwing anti-Irish trash which he propagated in the newspaper which he made into the worst in Irish history. Along the way he made it an incestuous rag, marrying his deputy editor, the ex-wife of Eoghan Harris, and employing her children and his own children as "journalists" across it. And then he'd turn around and condemn people who crossed him for their nepotism and cronyism.

This is a newspaper which until last week was calling for a property boom and glorifying the parasite developers who have avoided Irish law by declaring themselves bankrupt in another jurisdiction. They were "heroes" apparently. That "newspaper" operated at so many level of superficiality, terribly-written articles and sophomore ideas it was painful. It reviled all culture, bar material culture which it glorified on each and every page. It was a rag for the cultureless nouveau riche - and Aengus Fanning is the person responsible for this. It portrayed a world of good and bad, heroes and villans - the sort of tabloid trash any discerning child would reject. He, personally, through the Sunday Independent rag, blew the bubble more than anybody else during the bubble. With the same ideological aggression he supported Ahern and the rest, and derided those who questioned the "Celtic Tiger". He got an idea, and he turned his entire paper and all its writers to serve his agenda. Aengus Fanning was never a friend of democracy or democratic debate in Ireland. If anybody needs proof of that, just remember his role in the closure of Chuck Feeney's Centre for Public Inquiry, an organisation which threatened powerful interests like O'Reilly's newspaper dominance with well-funded public interest investigations.

I have never been so happy that somebody is dead. Now, for the overthrow of O'Reilly and his strangehold on the Irish media and democratic politics in this state. Take the head out and all the sycophants will fall with it.

Rebelheart

IRE60 wrote: »

A fairly sh1t thing to say, fairly reprehensible actually.

It was spot on. What is reprehensible is people trying to defend Aengus Fanning and make him out to be something he wasn't. The guy was the lowest of the low. Many, many people in Irish society said this when he was alive. Why you think they should not say it when he's dead and brush over what Fanning stood for is the dishonesty here.

Sunnyisland

Don't buy his newspaper and agree with a lot of the posts here criticizing him,But he is dead now so may he rest in peace.

Horsebox_twenty

Rebelheart wrote: »

I hope that individual never rests in peace....... Fanning was a complete bastard. He was the gutter in gutter journalism....... Aengus Fanning was a thug bullying all and sundry....... some of the most obnoxious, mentally unstable .....nutjobs society has produced........ He dehumanised so many decent people....... I have never been so happy that somebody is dead.........

Quite. You might want to look in the mirror. I don't think the Sindo is the exclusive home of obnoxious nutjobs......

Aengus Fanning, RIP. I often disagreed with you and your paper, and I very often disagreed with how you treated stories...... but you were a brilliant editor. Anybody who can't objectively see that knows nothing about newspapers.

RGDATA!

Horsebox_twenty wrote: »

Quite. You might want to look in the mirror. I don't think the Sindo is the exclusive home of obnoxious nutjobs......

Aengus Fanning, RIP. I often disagreed with you and your paper, and I very often disagreed with how you treated stories...... but you were a brilliant editor. Anybody who can't objectively see that knows nothing about newspapers.

serious question -
can you speak a bit as to his brilliance as an editor? I wouldn't be a fan of the paper, and in all the tributes I've read I haven't actually got a sense of what his qualities as an editor were.

Horsebox_twenty

RGDATA! wrote: »

serious question -
can you speak a bit as to his brilliance as an editor? I wouldn't be a fan of the paper, and in all the tributes I've read I haven't actually got a sense of what his qualities as an editor were.

Why was he brilliant? Because he got results, plain and simple.

Look at the Irish Times, the SB Post and other worthy newspapers - they're all on their asses commercially. Fanning took over a struggling publication in the middle of a recession, and turned it into easily the most successful newspaper in the country.

Governments were terrified of it, everybody slagged it off but almost everybody read it, and it very often set the agenda in its own inimitable way. Sindo is the most important newspaper in the country politically, like it or not. The Irish Times likes to think it is, but it isn't.

Fanning's newspaper made pots of money because people bought it. And people only bought it because Fanning knew what they wanted and gave it to them. That requires a certain brilliance in itself. No other newspaper editor in the country has ever managed to do the same thing with anything the same level of success, so it obviously isn't easy to do.

Lots of people say they hate the Sindo. But lots of peple buy it.

Fanning was, by all accounts, an eccentric, slightly mad sort of fellow. But nobody can take his achievements away from him.

steelcityblues

Even after he is buried, I doubt we will hear any critical discussion of his paper and its positives/negatives on any broadcast medium. Or any other newspapers for that matter.

That's the small Irish meeja bubble, for ya.

Paddy De Plasterer

But the virus will remain on so long as O Reilly is hovering around. You could have, God help us, that thicko Brendan O Connor, he is tipped as new editor.
I will never forgive Reilly, Fanning and their sidekicks for what they did to this country. He was also a lick ass of Bertie and helped ensure he had three terms to ruin this country of ours. While it is not nice to speak ill of the dead, I cannot have any regrets for his passing.

Paddy De Plasterer

Brilliant editor my ass. He was a lick ass for Bertie and FF. He employed nuts like Harris, O Dea, Larkin, Bulldog O Connor, Corcoran, Drennan. Such a shower of nutjobs.

mike65

A brilliant editor takes a publication, finds its core and develops that so the name means something beyond being a mere paper, Paul Dacre did it with the Daily Mail in the 90s, Kelvin Mckenzie with the Sun in the 80s, Harold Evans at the Sunday Times in the 60s.

It doesn't matter a **** whether you admire or hate the product. All of the above examples saw the title grow, come to dominate their market segments and become a shorthand for the kind of people who read them.

Until Fanning took it over "the Sindo" didn't really exist, it was just another Sunday paper.

goose2005

Paddy De Plasterer wrote: »

But the virus will remain on so long as O Reilly is hovering around. You could have, God help us, that thicko Brendan O Connor, he is tipped as new editor.
I will never forgive Reilly, Fanning and their sidekicks for what they did to this country. He was also a lick ass of Bertie and helped ensure he had three terms to ruin this country of ours. While it is not nice to speak ill of the dead, I cannot have any regrets for his passing.

You can't really blame them if so many people are willing to pay €2.70 every week for their product. Unfortunately, the Sindo is what Middle Ireland wants. Fanning was very successful from a business point of view, even though he was bad for journalism.

ziggy

This post has been deleted.

mike65

ziggy wrote: »

This post has been deleted.

You are confusing truth with the papers. The editors job is to make the paper a success not an official record of fact.

Snickers Man

Father Damo wrote: »

Personally he may have been a nice guy, god knows, but he overseen years of garbage by the the UK and Irelands worst newspaper

Be gone, illiterate.

PS I agree with your general point of view.

Serious point: this is the news and media forum. Can this not be held to a slightly higher standard of grammar than the rest of Boards?

I suggest banning people for a week for incorrect use of the past participles of the words see and do.

As well as being lenient with those who stray off topic.

Speaking of which: Fanning? Arsehole!

Cardinal Richelieu

I heard the radio ad today for this weekends Sunday Independent, seems to be a fanzine to the greatness of Aengus Fanning. Seriously someone needs to give the Sindo a reality check.

EggsAckley

Cardinal Richelieu wrote: »

I heard the radio ad today for this weekends Sunday Independent, seems to be a fanzine to the greatness of Aengus Fanning

Heres an example of what not to look forward to (no author on the web-site so I don't know who it is who is being so gushing)

ALL THE possibilities it had to reject are what give life and meaning to an actual character," wrote W H Auden, one of Aengus Fanning's favourite poets. He read a lot of poetry. One of our last conversations was about the American Modernist, Hart Crane, whom he had been reading because of the enthusiasm of the critic Harold Bloom.I don't suppose he contemplated the writing of poetry. He had far too keen a grasp of reality for that. But there were other possibilities which he forewent apart from the five All-Ireland medals which a Senior Kerry footballer recently assured me he would have won if he had stuck to the game after his Minor career. We first met in the Queen's Elm in Chelsea in the Sixties, one of the few places which writers really did frequent and I think his spell as a barman there was an interval in what was supposed to be an acting rather than a journalistic career.
A little over 20 years later when I met him again he was a newspaper editor. By then I had known a lot of editors, literary and otherwise, and was to know a few more. Let me say that Aengus was the best editor of any magazine, review or newspaper that I ever had the pleasure of writing for. He consulted your wishes. If he thought you had any value as a contributor he would make sure you knew that. He always sent you a note of gratitude and congratulation when he thought you deserved it. And he had a wide range of interests so you could be sure your references weren't too arcane for the editor at least.
It has been said often enough that he brought about a revolution in Irish Sunday journalism. And this has been analysed in terms of outlook and opinion and the readership he found. I would like to say -- and I am sure he would want it said -- that he and Anne Harris brought the change about. It was one that was to take place everywhere but the Sunday Independent was in advance of other papers. What they did was to abolish the distinction between heavy and light, between portentous and lively. The Sunday Independent became under Aengus's editorship a newspaper in which almost everything would fit which was flavoured by an appropriate level of sophistication and style. What I particularly like about it is its sense of humour. Many of its writers know that there is almost nothing which doesn't have its humorous side and that even in these times a laugh should not be a rarity.
Aengus was untouched by the great secret corrupting forces in Irish journalism, which are cynicism and its obverse, sentimentality. The capacity to give and receive friendship is, I think, like the proper meaning of the word itself, becoming rarer in our world. Aengus had that capacity, and it is for this as much as for his public achievements that I will remember him.

Cardinal Richelieu wrote: »

Seriously someone needs to give the Sindo a reality check.

The only people who can do that are the newspaper buying public and that's by not buying the damn thing.

goose2005

Private Eye commented that the media gave much more prominence to the death of Christopher Hitchens, a journalist, than they did to Vaclav Havel. It's difficult to imagine any non-journalist getting six or seven pages devoted to their passing, but when it's "one of their own" journos can't resist.

Stavro Mueller

FYI, it was Anthony Cronin who wrote that gushing piece.

All papers have an agenda and obviously the Sindo is doing something right. Personally I can't bear the sight of the rag and that it pays for the opinions of the Jody Corcorans, Barry Egans, Marc Colemans and Brendan O'Connors of this world. We have to accept though that a lot of people buy it on a Sunday. It's the bottom line that counts. The Sunday Tribune was a better paper than the Sindo in my opinion but that didn't stop it going under.

steelcityblues

cymbaline wrote: »

FYI, it was Anthony Cronin who wrote that gushing piece.

All papers have an agenda and obviously the Sindo is doing something right. Personally I can't bear the sight of the rag and that it pays for the opinions of the Jody Corcorans, Barry Egans, Marc Colemans and Brendan O'Connors of this world. We have to accept though that a lot of people buy it on a Sunday. It's the bottom line that counts. The Sunday Tribune was a better paper than the Sindo in my opinion but that didn't stop it going under.

None of the big media groups in this country are interested in devoting time to critical self-examination. Sad, but true.

trashcan

goose2005 wrote: »

Private Eye commented that the media gave much more prominence to the death of Christopher Hitchens, a journalist, than they did to Vaclav Havel. It's difficult to imagine any non-journalist getting six or seven pages devoted to their passing, but when it's "one of their own" journos can't resist.

Absolutely. Is there a more self-regarding profession out there than journalism ?

dublinman1990

There is a big enough photo on Aengus on the Sindo's frontpage today, if anyone had noticed it in the shops.

I do agree that the Sindo is very badly written. I remember my mum buying the newspaper as a one off on some Sunday before the last GE. I remember reading the GE supplement and an article by Brendan O'Connor, I thought it was very poor reading for my taste.

Here is a link for a tribute of Fanning from BO'C.

http://www.independent.ie/national-news/brendan-oconnor-carved-out-of-true-kerry-rock-was-he-2996223.html

It needs to be reformed in a big way or it can go in the dustbin IMO.

jdivision

trashcan wrote: »

Absolutely. Is there a more self-regarding profession out there than journalism ?

Legal, medical, politics and banking all come to mind

mike65

All of the "professions" are stacked to the gunnel with self absorbed selfish bastards.

Android 666

Anytime I hear people talk about the amazing things Aengus Fanning did to the Sunday Independent, I always think of these two things:

http://i51.tinypic.com/2poqk2v.jpg

http://www.independent.ie/opinion/analysis/the-smart-ballsy-guys-are-buying-up-property-right-now-1047118.html

They encapsulate everything that is reprehensible about the newspaper and the judgement of its editor.

mike65

Shocked its still open for comments!

Paddy De Plasterer

wonder will the gushing tributes continue this coming Sunday. Who will the new editor be, Blockhead O Connor or maybe Anne Harris, or Joady Corcoran. Either way I suppose the bile will continue. Harris was made a senator because he was able to deliver the Sindo for Bertie in 2007, because of the woman he used have who was then defected to Fanning.

goose2005

Paddy De Plasterer wrote: »

wonder will the gushing tributes continue this coming Sunday. Who will the new editor be, Blockhead O Connor or maybe Anne Harris, or Joady Corcoran. Either way I suppose the bile will continue. Harris was made a senator because he was able to deliver the Sindo for Bertie in 2007, because of the woman he used have who was then defected to Fanning.

Katy French to be declared Eternal Editor, a la Kim Il-sung.