The cutting edge of the Indo

VINNIE DOYLE TURNS UP AT the office every day around three, browses through the British dailies, and for the next two hours manageement burdens him with its problems and the union with theirs. He hears from features on what they have lined up, and from advertising telling him how many pages he has that night. But his working day proper does not start till the five p.m. news conference and only gets into gear around six, when he takes' himself up to the second floor and the subs room. There the tie is pulled down, sleeves are rolled up, and the gold watch laid out in front of him at the head of the subs table. Here the real work begins.  By: Alan Murdoch

Doyle wades into every aspect of the production process, paying little heed to demarcation. What motivates him is the sheer thrill of running a daily newspaper. One minute he is picking the stories to be used, the next doing page layouts, then writing picture captions and headlines. This constant intervention is partly due to his boundless enthusiasm, partly his mistrust of colleagues' abilities to do it as well as himself.

In some areas he is unrivalled.

His hallmark is the one word front page headline in massive "World War III" type that somehow encapsulates the essence of a major story:

"Treachery" (the night Sadat was assassinated by his own troops); "Butchery" (the Dublin bombings); "Surrender" (a tongue in cheek desscription of a tiny fisheries' protection boat's attempt to intercept a giant Soviet trawler engaged in illegal fishing).

He is one of those people who actually likes being in a dingy smokeefilled room till two and three in the morning, surrounded by crumpled copy paper and men in stockinged feet whose socks smell to high heaven. He thrives on the big event - "J eez, that's a great story!" he enthuses down the phone to the newsdesk, as first reports of a major accident or political scandal filter through. His squat figure becomes charged with adrenalin that he transmits to collleagues, and he starts despatching reporters and photographers like batttallions of infantry. His natural urge is to smash his way to the heart of a story with sheer weight of numbers.

At the root of all this enthusiasm is his gut competitive instinct. Direcctors might dream of a monopoly in the market, but Doyle would hate it.

'He needs the opposition there so he can have the satisfaction of skinning them.

AN ONLY CHILD RAISED IN Duolin by his mother, Doyle attended St Vincent's School in Glassnevin, and was introduced to the world of newspapers in the mid-1950s as a copy boy on the Irish Press, by the then boss Major Vivion de Valera. His first wages were three guineas a week.

From occasional weekend sports assignments he worked his way up in 1961 to take over the Sunday Press 'show' column, a popular round up of film and showbiz gossip.

Though noted as a speedy operator, he also acquired the tag of a 'scissors and paste' man - a less than compliimentary term in newspapers, meaning someone whose material is not always original. One day, following the myssterious appearance in his column of an item remarkably similar to one in Time magazine, he was called to the office of the editor - the very military Colonel Matt Feehan. He reputedly said just two words to him: "Goodbye Vinnie". The young reporter went to the nearest pub and drowned his sorrows. A few hours later a bunch of Press staff arrived in the same pub, from which Doyle had not moved, in a state of some excitement: in the intervening time the editor himself had been replaced. Vinnie· breathed again.

The move over to the Independent group came in the mid-1960s to a job as a sub editor on the short-lived Sunday Independent colour suppleement.

When the supplement folded Doyle became a sub on the daily paper, where he stayed till the mid-l 970s, becoming night editor under Aidan Pender, and assisted by Niall Hanly, now editor of the Evening Herald. This was a period of hard work and hard play, with Doyle and assorted hell raising colleagues becoming famiiliar faces in such nocturnal watering holes as the spartan (and exclusively male) Irish Times club - a sort of licensed rest room for printers beetween editions.

With his promotion to Herald editor in 1978 the demands of work increased and such revelry became less frequent. From the start Doyle made it clear he wanted strong commmitment from his editorial staff. "Everyone will have to prove themmselves", he told them. He set about a vigorous facelift of the paper, dubbed the 'Herald Relaunch', involving a redesigned front page, a new features editor from Fleet Street, and instilled a more .aggressive, competitive spirit on the news front. He employed John Feeney as gossip columnist.

Doyle's relationship with the 'stone' (the compositors) had always been good, enabling him to get large amounts of copy through close to edition deadlines. Despite some fricction with the then Chief News Editor, the late ebullient Bill Shine (who up till then would bellow at him "Get back to the subs room" if he interrfered in news gathering) he established a useful rapport with the more ambiitious reporters.

The results delighted Tony O'Reilly, who in his chairman's remarks at the end of the 1980 financial year noted that Herald sales and advertising were both rising. He called it "editorially the most improved paper in Ireland".

When Aidan Pender retired in Febbruary 1981 Doyle was elevated further to edit the flagship of the Abbey Street papers, the Independent. This came as a surprise to some in the building, notably Niall Hanly, for a time front runner for the top job. But the choice made sound commerrcial sense - Doyle had revived the evening paper's accounts and columns on the slimmest of budgets.

To THOSE AROUND HIM VINNIE Doyle presents a somewhat macho, flint-edged image, characterised by a fondness for American slang, apeing the grizzled editor in the movie 'The Front Page' (the original 1931 version - the Indo boys consider the 1974 Walter Matthau version too syrupy) and brusque clipped speech, delivered in a peculiar transatlantic squawk, laced with foul language.

A forceful personality, he generates fierce commitment and passionate resentment in equal shares. Colleagues, past and present, split into opposing camps in their opinions of him: "He has a great feel for the presentation of stories"; "A 20th Century Bar-

barian"; "He's got a lot of balls ðhe's not afraid of anything"; "The man's a terrible mixture of snobbery, sycophancy and arrogance"; "A trier who rises to meet com petition."; "Vinnie's not a cultured man  mention Van Gogh and he'll think you're talking about a pig."

His abrasiveness masks a vague insecurity - a surprising lack of confidence in his own abilities. (It is said he never expected to be made editor of the Independent till it happened.) But it is also born of his impatience at what he sees as the poor quality of the staff at his disposal. The paper, partly because of too rigid rostering, seems currently unable to root out original stories and produce thorough investigations.

Seeing events in terms of what they can provide in shock headlines inevittably results in a cartoon strip view of the world around him, be it the man waiting to go to the electric chair ("Didya hear? - they fried the bastard this morning!") or the sinking of a ship ("Eight dead? - Can't you get ten?"). The day ex-Italian premier Aldo Moro was ki-inapped he was thrilled - "Vinnie was jumping up and down in the newsroom with glee. It made his day," recalls an old collleague. Sometimes this outlook leads him to go over the top, with headlines like "WAVES OF DEATH" after the Doolin drownings, and "MAD MARIAN" during the Herrema siege, when Doyle was night editor.

In Doyle's vocabulary, being called a hard, tough newsman can only be a compliment. "Women" he once said "lack the aggression to be good news reporters." He confines them to features, courts, and writing 'colour'. The prejudice is endemic in the alllmale company management. Out of a total of 180 staff journalists there are barely a dozen women.

The editor's addiction to news is such that he will now not go on a foreign holiday - he always has to be within striking distance of the paper in case a major story breaks. On nights off he insists on being rung by a trusted assistant, such as picture editor Tom Brady, with full details of what is going in where and with what headline.

His social life is consequently subbordinated to the demands of the paper. During a rare trip to the cinema with wife Gertie (his first night off after eight weeks as Indo editor) reports flashed through to the subs that Ronald Reagan had been shot. A copy boy was sent to fetch him from the Odeon, where he was watchhing "My Brilliant Career".

After a certain amount of groping around in the dark hissing "Vinnie, ' are you there?" he found the man.

"The President's been shot," he whisspered. "Which one?" asked Doyle, needing a good excuse to absent himself.

In spite of the brash exterior, Doyle is not entirely insensitive, and is stung by any joke at his expense. He is also the only one allowed to introduce levity into the paper. Long-serving colleagues recall when he attempted to establish himself as a. man of fashion, appearing on summer's evennings in an off-white suit and making much of some article in his wardrobe bearing the Chester Barry label. About this time a picture arrived for a news story on a Clery's sale. There, emergging from the store, brown paper parcel under his arm, was Doyle. The first he knew of it was when the picture apppeared in the paper. He was incensed.

THE BRIEF GIVEN HIM ON becoming Indo editor was to improve the "quality" of the readerrship - to get the paper into more 'AB' upper income homes to improve its appeal to advertisers, while mainntaining total sales. But satisfying simulltaneously the divergent strands of the existing readership was itself a tricky feat of journalistic acrobatics.

For while provincial readers still accounted for a major part of sales research showed a major selling point was the deaths column) the paper's appeal (then and now) stretched from farmers to suburban solicitors, to working class inner city Dubliners (many of whom buy it for the draw based on the first letters of the editoorial headlines. Various attempts have been made to fix this by offering bribes to Indo subs, including Doyle, all of them unsuccessful.)

Key weapons in its up-market appeal are the property and business sections and prestigious columns such as Bruce Arnold's. Doyle added the news analysis section to lure readers with the (rarely fulfilled) promise of the inside story - and more space for specialist interests.

Overall, he has met with only limited success in reshaping his readerrship. One of the problems is the mechanical way he goes about courtting the claret-drinking customers. Always prone to relying on London dailies for ideas here, he is drawn to any materialistic topic easily transsferred to an Irish context - hence the constant recycling of items on 'the cost of' everything from executive cars, clothes and homes, to birth, bringing up families, and schools for executive children. (This began on the Herald and he continued it on the Independent.) He often appears to think all he needs to impress uppmarket readers is the by-line of a tame right wing professor, regardless of the fact that he may be writing hopelessly out of his specialist field (as for example Paul Wilkinson on Poland or El Salvador).

There is also a practice of shallow 'colour' (descriptive) stories on society events that are really little more than lists of names. "If you mentioned champagne three times in the first paragraph it was considered uppmarket," recalls a veteran.

The features area was a problem for successive editors, but has been partly regenerated with a windfall that came Doyle's way via the challlenge of the Daily News. Feeling the need to strengthen the paper to meet the newcomer, management approved a long deferred plan to expand this area of the staff, giving the editor cash to hire five key people, including a feature writer, a gossip columnist, and Nicholas Leonard as London Editor.

A continuing problem has been what note of populism to strike in the pursuit of the catch-all readership. His front pages veer between extremes of stodgy business leads and screaming banner headlines as Doyle indulges his tabloid impulses. On inside pages solemn financial or industrial news analysis rubs shoulders uneasily with unashamedly sensational features. And when a regular item is suddenly pulled out to make way for a news-story that overruns (e.g. a fraud case blotting out the entire books page), it seems little attention is being paid to the overall identity and coherence of the product.

A more obvious conflict is between the racier styles introduced to draw in new readers under 35 and the tastes of traditionalist Catholic readers with easily offended moral sensibilities. Doyle cannot risk alienating the latter but needs to win a share of the younnger generation if the paper is not to have a readership literally dying on its feet.

Not a devout man ("I've no time for all this God business") Doyle loathes the forbidding pulpit prose of his religious correspondent Joe Power.

Doyle spends surprisingly little time deliberating over the political line of the paper, and the urge to use the news pages as a stick to chastise individual politicians simply does not grab him in the same way as his London counterparts. Also, brushes with Charles Haughey's solicitors have left the paper wary of taking risks with libel.

Nevertheless, Doyle has presided over a changing political tone in the paper that contrasts sharply with its positions twenty or thirty years ago. As the referendum day editorial last month showed, it is now less likely to be crudely partisan.

The change is partly out of deferrence to the new target audience of urban middle classes with more open minds than its old mainstay rural constituency, and partly a reflection of a wider secularisation and cynicism about party politics. Above all it reflects how the paper has become first and foremost a commercial enterprise: in ten years since the O'Reilly takeover it has gone from a family controlled organ with a recoggnised party allegiance and fixed moral view to another subsidiary of an exxpanding corporation dominated by sales targets and strict budget controls.

THE DOYLE REGIME REVOLVES around a tight knit core of sub editors and reporters whom he regards as competent and compliant. "You're either a Vinnie man or you're not. You're either in or you're out," says an Indo veteran. His team, notably during late night drinks at the Oval or the Sackville across O'Connell

Street are the only ones at all privy to his deliberations. At the moment it includes Michael Brophy (night editor), Gerry O'Regan (acting features editor and all purpose utility man), Paul Hopkins (deputy features editor) and in the newsroom, younger men such as P.L Cunningham and Paul Drury.

In contrast, those who work nine to five have little contact with him and are regarded as not real newsspapermen. Two others are close to Doyle, but are also known for having views of their own - Aengus Fanning, the news analysis editor and formerly agriculture correspondent and Maurice Hearne, by day a barrister and a civilising influence on Doyle in his wilder moments.

Doyle's daily dominance of the paper results in an almost Stalinist paralysis of individual initiative. Also, his system of patronage has the side effect of wasting real talent, especially in the news area. While a handful of favourites and frequently discarded freelancers get prominence, less obbsequious but more proficient reporrters grow rusty with under-use, and the whole paper suffers.

At a recent meeting a disgruntled staffer noted that some 60 ideas for features and investigations gathered from journalists all round the building had been dismissed by the editor in language that would make Richard Nixon blush.

The most important of his lieuteenants is Michael Brophy, plucked from the newsroom in 1979 to be his assistant on the Herald. They work like twin halves of the same brain. Brophy's instincts mirror precisely those of his mentor - both are enerrgetic, choleric types who thrive on what Fleet Street editors call a 'sexy' story - one with the classic ingredients of popular press news values: money, sex, and crime, and preferably all three.

It was Brophy in Doyle's absence who took the decision to publish the infamous faked Prince Charles/Lady Di phone conversations'. (The. pair's similarities even extend to dress and demeanour. On a typical evening the newsroom door bursts open to reveal - after a dramatic pause - a swaggerring editor, the arms of his sweater tied around his shoulders. Half an hour later the same theatrical entrance is repeated, this time with Brophy sportting identically arranged knitwear.)

He is also the man chosen for unnpleasant assignments (Doyle himself, has described him as "brutal"). He spearheaded the undermining of Dick Roche's control of features. After Roche left the building on September 21 last year, Brophy gave detailed instructions to caretakers for changes to fit the new regime. The following morning Roche arrived to find three of Doyle's key men - Brophy, Hopkins and Fanning - dominating his departtment from a solid phalanx of desks in the middle of the room. For a man like Roche with a troublesome hernia it was not the ideal start to the day.

What binds the 'team' together is the fierce loyalty of its members to the leader. Brophy's commitment wavered only once. When the old Sunday Tribune was being set up he applied for and got the job of news editor of the new paper, tempted by an £ 18 ,000 salary and talk of a seat on the board. Doyle got straight into a taxi to approach a replacement, then returned to attend Brophy's leaving "wake" in the Oval. There, at the last minute, the younger man backed down and asked for - and got - his job back.

A witness described Doyle as very emotional about it. He saw Brophy's move as an act of treason, and has probably never trusted him as fully since.

The Daily News collapse late last year elicited another characteristic response. Then, several ex-Indo men applied for their still-vacant jobs back only to learn that a blacklist was blocking their return. (Attributed to MD Joe Hayes, who privately revealed the editor was behind it, and that he [Hayes] could not understand it.) An Abbey Street executive and elder statesman was unequivocal:

"Vinnie's ideas on loyalty would make even Rudyard Kipling wince."

DOYLE LIVES IN FEAR OF Hayes, the managerial whizz kid. An early success with the Gallagher tobacco firm, Hayes moved to the Independent group as marketing direcctor, becoming MD in June 1981. He keeps the three editors there under tremendous pressure on both editorial and financial matters, badgering them daily with criticism and instructions. A live wire, it is said he would sell the paper on the streets himself if it were necessary.

During a recent power failure at Abbey Street he personally interceded with ESB engineers to get the supply back on before print runs were dissrupted. He once tried to interfere in the case room (workplace of the compositors and a centre of autonoomous power in any newspaper where even some editors fear to tread). Production all but came to a standstill.

Hayes's pressure is sometimes cited as the reason for Doyle's pilfering from other papers. While there may be a grain of truth in this it was also common practice long before Hayes came on the scene. As the late author and Independent sub-editor Kevin Faller was wont to say: "there were days when you just couldn't tell the Daily Mail and Evening Herald features pages apart." Doyle, a born tabloid editor if ever there was one, idolises the, Daily Mail as the brash mid-market paper he would love to edit.

One of the most notorious of Indo plagiarisms took place as far back as 1975, when Doyle was still night editor. During the Herrema siege an

Irish Press photographer scored a major exclusive by penetrating tight security around the Monasterevin house where Eddie Gallagher and Marion Coyle were holding the Dutch industrialist, and picked up details of conversations and of how food was getting through. The whole story was lifted from the Press first edition on to the city edition of the Independent almost verbatim, and without any acknowledgement. When the Press man involved later went up to receive an award for his efforts, Doyle, also at the ceremony, was heard to say to him "Congratulations - and thanks!"

His lifting of stories is far from the momentary slip under pressure that his defences before NUJ disciplinaries would have us believe. The process is now almost institutionalised. It starts around 12.35 when a copy boy delivers the first (country) edition of the Independent to subs and the newssdesk.

While they take stock of its conntents, he fetches the first editions of the Times and the Press. By 12.50 these are in front of the editor who combs them carefully for items or angles missed by the Independent. Depending on the stories and his mood, he may then get on the phone to the late reporter in the newsroom, saying "Get eight or ten paragraphs out of this." When the competition has the edge he may in a single night call for as many as four stories to be hi-jacked in this way, mostly from the Press.

All this is tame however compared to the voracious cannibalising of the inside pages of Fleet Street dailies prior to the recent overhaul of the Indo's features department. Before that there was an unremitting famine of feature ideas, which led to regular but less public pillaging sessions, usually in mid-afternoon in the editor's office.

There, conspicuous on the dark mahogany table, was an orangeehandled adjustable razor. Doyle would go spare if it went missing. Its only use' was in filleting great chunks of the feature pages of anything from the Mail to the Financial Times. Frequently little more than a headline and the first two paragraphs would be read before the pirated page was passed on for a 're-write job' - hackking it into some form palatable to the Irish reader. In this way bemused subordinates found themselves facing the near impossible task of turning what in the original was essentially a defence of the apartheid regime in South Africa, or the hang 'em and flog 'em lobby on the British Right, into something resembling democratic argument.

In mitigation, it has to be said that plagiarism exists in some form in virtually every daily paper. The difference at Doyle's Independent is that there it is done with a recklesssness that is quite startling. As a result Doyle holds the record for a fine imposed by the NUJ - £1,000 for lifting a Frank McDonald story from the Irish Times in 1981. The fine was later reduced on appeal to £500.

The case highlighted Doyle's sensiitivity to criticism. When the Irish Times reported the tribunal's decision he was only persuaded under strong pressure from printing in reply a defence of his actions in the Indo's second city edition.

Such is the primacy of commercial objectives in the boardroom at Abbey Street, that Doyle's little foibles will probably- be tolerated if he can hold circula tion at its present level (eight percent down on a year ago). But should it slip further below the magic total that matches the combined sales of the other two Dublin dailies - with massive consequences for advertising revenues - the name on the editor's door may itself be in line for a reewrite job. •