Interview with Gavin McLoughlin

Business News Editor for The Independent, Graduated from Law and Political Science in 2013, by James Watson

I always wanted to do Journalism. I chose Law for two reasons. In 2009 there was a lot of fear about the future of journalism and where it was going to go. It was seen as precarious employment. I was interested in the law, so I thought if journalism didn’t work out that would be something to fall back on. The second reason was in the event that I did manage to get into journalism after the four years, I thought law would give me a lot of skills that would come in handy; critical thinking and analysis in particular. I ended up doing a masters in journalism in DCU.

The Law School Cabaret, for sure. That was always good fun, I found myself up on stage a few times for that. You also meet a lot of interesting people, my class were always talking about different things and I found that engaging with the people around me, my classmates in particular, was very intellectually stimulating and definitely helped to hone my critical thinking skills.

I started out on the Cadet Programme in the Irish Independent. The daily paper and the Sunday paper are two different beasts. I did six months on the daily and six months on the Sunday paper for my cadetship. After that, thankfully, they decided to keep me on. I spent three years at the Sunday Independent. The Sunday Independent was great because there’s only one paper a week so there is time to think about things and to get out and meet people. That’s where all of the best stories come from, getting out and meeting people. Stories are about relationships with people and when you’re working for a Sunday paper you have time to build those relationships. The deadlines aren’t the same as the daily paper. I wrote for the Sunday Independent for three years and that helped me to get into the habit of developing sources and good journalistic practices. Then, a job came up in the daily paper as Business News Editor, which I got. I’ve been doing that for six months now. The pace of life is a little bit quicker but that time I spent at the Sunday paper gave me a good base of contacts, let me observe things and see what works and what doesn’t, and I carried that over to into the more hectic daily paper environment.

It was a bit of a fluke to be honest. I didn’t even study business for the Leaving Cert. I always saw myself getting into political journalism or sport, it just happened that business news was where an opportunity came up. The Independent had a programme called the ‘Cadetship’ programme and two places came up for Cadets in business news. They approached me, I met the business editor at the time and I managed to get a job. It wasn’t where I thought I’d end up but when the opportunity came up I had to jump at it. I’ve stuck with it ever since.

Definitely. It’s a bit of a cliché but a lot of the Leaving Cert is about learning stuff off by heart, trying to predict what is going to come up and tailoring your study towards that, whereas I definitely think Trinity helped to develop my critical thinking; Law in particular more than Political Science. Studying law makes you flexible, you have to be able to argue from either side of the facts you’re given. That’s really given me the edge in my career.

Once you know what field you want to be in, think about what your entry route is into that profession. It may be that you have to do further study, you might have to go into a graduate programme. The key is figuring out your entry route, how you’re going to get in. It’s no harm if you get a chance to meet someone working in the industry you want and chat to them. I would encourage people to seek advice from someone in your target industry and to take their advice on board. Events like GradLink, run by the Law School, are a great opportunity and they give students the chance to meet people in different industries.