Limerick person of month Browne makes mark at New York Times

HE may have arrived at journalism a little later than most, but Malachy Browne has made up for lost time.

Not alone has he landed a job with the most famous newspaper in the world, The New York Times, but he also played a key role in seeing the publisher land an Emmy award last October.

The Broadford native who is a multimedia journalist and senior story producer with The Times, joined his colleagues from the Visual Investigations Unit, at the 39th Annual News and Documentary Emmy Awards in New York last October.

The Times won the award for an investigative film documentary into the Las Vegas massacre of 2017. Malachy and his team were presented with the prestigious accolade exactly one year to the day after the massacre took place in which 58 people attending a concert were gunned down and slain. Called 10 Minutes, 12 Gunfire Bursts, 30 Videos, Mapping the Las Vegas Massacre, the film won the Outstanding New Approaches: Current News award.

Having completed his formative education in Broadford National School and St Munchin’s College in Limerick city, Malachy studied engineering in UCD before going on to complete a masters in international relations in UL.

“That was very good - a great year,” Malachy tells the Leader from The New York Times headquarters in New York.

“It was a very good course. For me, it formalised writing and researching international affairs and that was kind of what lead me into journalism.”

His uncle, veteran broadcaster and journalist Vincent Browne gave him an apprenticeship at Village,  the current affairs and cultural magazine which ceased publication in 2008.

“He needed a website and I needed experience in journalism, and a job,” laughs Malachy of the alliance.

“I helped build a website and then we started doing online features around elections and what not and then I started getting involved more in the production of the magazine and gradually writing articles and learning how to report. Then the magazine changed from a weekly to a monthly so there was a bit more space to do features.”

Malachy had just turned 30 at the time. He lived with Vincent  -who is currently researching a book on Charlie Haughey - both while he was in college and working in Dublin.

One wonders what it was like living and working with probably the most feared, and indeed revered, journalists in the country.

“Vincent has very high standards of journalism and you learn a lot in a very short space of time. It was a good foundation, I would say. He was very much about fact-based journalism and opinion and also one of the things we learned there is to build on other reporting that already exists - to try and get a new angle.”

OK, that’s work, but what was he like to live with?”

“We’d be fighting over Weetabix in the morning,” Malachy laughs.

“No, ah he was great. He and Jean were very generous letting me stay with them for so long. And I grew up with Emma and Julia, their daughters, so we are all very close - my sister and I are very close to them. He’s going on holidays with us later this year.”

Before he dipped his toe into the world of journalism Malachy did computer programming and returned to that after Village folded during the recession.

“A group of us from Village set up another website called Politico. We had a stab at that but it was hard to sustain that and then I joined Storyful around 2011. That was foreign news basically and what we were doing was building a news agency that used technology to detect events through social media.”

Malachy was with Storyful for about four years before joining Reported.ly which was set up by the founder of eBay, Pierre Omidyar. Malachy was based in Dublin and they were based in New York so he was over and back to New York quite a bit and that lead to a conversation in The New York Times.

And just how did that conversation come about?

“Around that time The New York Times had done what was called an innovation report which was basically to assess their place in terms of a very changing media landscape and trying to address the gaps that they were seeing with other more digitally progressive news organisations,” he explains. “And so off the back of that they were looking for people who came from non-traditional journalism backgrounds and that was the pretext for me having a conversation with some of the editors in here and then that all happened really quickly and we ended up applying for a Visa and coming over here.”

That all happened three years ago this week.

“It was a sacrifice for Siobhan really, she gave up her job and moved over. She was fully behind it. She said it was a great opportunity - if we were to turn it down we could be thinking in 10 or 15 years down the line, well, what would have happened?”

Malachy is married to Siobhan, a native of Rathkeale and they have three children Diarmaid, 8, Sarah, 6, and Emmett, 5.

Malachy gets back to Limerick at least once a year, if not twice, to see his parents Mary and David, sister Susan and her family.

In The New York Times Malachy is a senior story producer on the Visual Investigations team (with whom he is pictured below, credit Earl Wilson/New York Times)

“I didn’t know what to expect,” he says of arriving to work on his first day at The Times. “I was very naive coming in here, about the size of it. And coming from two start-ups it’s a very different beast altogether. It moves much more slowly, there are a lot more checks and balances in here but the standard of journalism is at a different level.”

The Visual Investigations Team specialises in, well, visual investigations - “that could be reconstructing a major news event to better explain it or to make it an immersive experience for readers so they can almost feel what that was like.

“For instance, the Las Vegas shooting, or we could deconstruct and investigate a chemicals weapons attack using eyewitness footage as well and try to figure out how it happened and who carried it out. Essentially, we are using anything from cellphone footage, to an Instagram picture to satellite imagery or scanner audio to try and connect the dots and try to make sense of an event.”

He worked on the Las Vegas Massacre for three weeks.

“That was a short one. What happened there is the police were very tight-lipped about the investigation and they were very sparing with the details they released and they also changed or revised the information they gave to reporters on several occasions and, of course, conspiracy theories started to swirl and we wanted to see if we could establish a timeline that was independent of what the police were offering and really try to understand what happened. I think it was the third visual investigation we did.”

The process was to gather as much cellphone footage as they could. A number of the concert goers, despite the rampage, had kept filming. “And that allowed us, in watching those videos back, as awful as they were, to detect the patterns and the gunfire, the duration of each burst of fire, the intervals to the next one and we realised that a lot of these are overlapping. Then when we put 35 videos or so on a timeline, I realised we actually have the entire event in video but also from multiple different angles so we were able to assess what’s going on at different locations over at the hotel, to front of stage where people are trapped, where people escaped, when the police first arrived and so on and so forth.”

It ended up being a minute by minute account of what happened “and I think people found it very immersive. A lot of the feedback we got from people who were there and even people who had lost family members was that they better understood what had happened. They had been craving that information even though it was such an horrific event.”

And, finally, Malachy’s advice to journalists either starting out on their career or looking to boost their CV?

“I would say develop skills that distinguish you and give you an edge,” he says. “Understand the digital landscape. Understand how to use data, FOI, use the open web - all the tools and information that’s available on the open web to bolster your reporting. Over here one thing that I have admired is the focus on visual journalism and that’s a field that’s growing, definitely. Right now, we are focusing on building our team and doing more on the ground reporting to bring more narrative elements into the videos we are producing and also to hear more from people directly affected by the events we cover.”

To learn more about the work the Visual Investigations Unit do and to view some of their work see https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/world/visual-investigations.html