Conan

You have to know these people and you have to know what's going on.

And in the world of media, you'd see it with the political correspondence when they're up in the Oireachtas or in the Dáil a lot.

It's all those little casual contacts that you have with people that develop relationships.

That's how you cover your section.

And that's the real value in that now.

Yeah, like it's, they're going, like it's a hard gig, you know, you go to an Olympics or a World Cup football, Rugby World Cup,

It's all day, every day.

You're contributing to podcasts.

You're making videos.

And then you're producing copy as well.

But in terms of the overall... I mean, I'm obviously the elder statesman in the room today.

And so...

You know, I go back to when I started to deal with line set machines for people where a journalist would write an article in or type an article on a typewriter and then hand it to somebody who would then retype it.

i mean so like i saw that happening i happened to work in my very first job was in one of the first newspapers in the country to go all computer so that the journalists had if you remember the old what would it call the little max do you remember those little uh the very first mac apple mac they were a fantastic little machine a quirky little machine so that was the longford leader and

So I've seen all that change.

I've seen, you know, from the height of the Sunday Independent selling over 300,000 newspapers a week at one point.

I tell you what hasn't changed, and it doesn't matter whether it's what your platform is, it still boils down to a few basic things.

Number one for me is content, obviously, the quality of it.

And if it's shite, people won't engage with it.

If this podcast is shite, people won't listen to it.