AT THE time of his appointment, it was assumed Aengus Fanning would pursue an editorial strategy that would bolster the Sunday Independentat the "quality" end of the market, seeing off any challenge from the fledgling Sunday Tribune.
Instead, Fanning did something that had been considered impossible – he widened the readership base of the Sunday Independentbeyond the traditional ABC1 social group, adding working-class readers in their thousands. However, he did this without eroding the appeal of the newspaper to its original target market.
The Sunday Independent, aka the Sindo, became known as a "broadsheet tabloid", adopting some of the brasher values of the latter while sticking to the larger physical format.
Fanning was a pioneering advocate for a brand of “personality” journalism that has now become commonplace in the industry. He paid his “star” journalists well, vigorously promoting their material via byline photographs, incorporating social gossip into the news mix and adorning the front page with models. One of his early and influential hires was Anne Harris, then editor of Image magazine, who became deputy editor of the newspaper and, later, his wife.
Under Fanning’s stewardship, the paper’s trenchant opinion journalism came thicker and faster. It veered from subversive to reactionary in its politics and social attitudes. Fanning himself was known for his pro-business and anti-Provo views – the paper was vicious in its attacks on John Hume for engaging with Sinn Féin leader Gerry Adams during the early days of the peace process.
His Sindo was also unashamedly agenda-driven. The newspaper was unique in the manner in which it would latch on to a subject and allocate half a dozen journalists to cover it, week after week, in the hope of scoring political goals. His campaigns didn’t always work, but when they did, the paper basked in its own zeitgeist.
Although his agendas often differed substantially from those of other newspapers, his peers in the industry attribute his strategy to personal beliefs rather than contrarianism.
His commercial achievements were unarguable. In the early 1990s, declines in Sunday newspaper readership as a whole were partly attributed to drops in Mass attendance and partly to the encroachment of British titles. But he managed to beat the trend, increasing sales, advertising revenues and profits. Circulation exceeded the 250,000 mark in 1993, breaching 300,000 later in the decade. In 1996, the paper began publishing a British edition.
In that same year, the murder of the newspaper’s crime correspondent, Veronica Guerin, proved a seminal moment in Fanning’s editorship. He had hired Guerin as part of a bid to raise the newspaper’s reputation for investigative journalism. She had been subject to several threats as she reported on Dublin gangland figures and was shot in the leg some 18 months before her murder. There were editorial controversies, too, many of which – such as a row about the provenance of a 1993 “world exclusive” interview with Bishop Eamonn Casey – played out on the pages of rival newspapers. Two incidents attracted the ire of the public – offensive comments made by columnist Mary Ellen Synon in 2000 and inaccurate coverage of the death of Liam Lawlor in 2005. Apologies and admissions of error were not uncommon during Fanning’s tenure, but his own position was usually secure.
An old-school style of newsroom management meant editorial meetings could be fraught. In 2001, Fanning apologised to another senior executive in the newspaper for physically attacking him in the newsroom. However, his editorial skill and instinct were also deeply respected by those same journalists and executives with whom he clashed. He made the Sunday Independentone of the two biggest media brands in the Republic (alongside RTÉ), making it a polarising but always colourful publication of which his colleagues were deeply proud.
Fanning was part of a newspaper family that went back several generations.
Though a native of Tralee, Co Kerry, it was his Offaly ancestry that lured him into the newspaper business. At the age of seven, he would help his grandmother read proofs of the Birr title, the Midland Tribune. He later began his career at the paper, which had been founded by his great-grandfather, Thomas Powell, and was edited by his uncle.
He first worked for Independent Newspapers in 1969 as a general reporter, becoming agricultural correspondent and then the Irish Independent's news analysis editor. His appointment as editor of the Sunday Independentin January 1984, succeeding Michael Hand, marked the beginning of a 28-year editorship of the newspaper, during which Fanning achieved unparalleled commercial success.
