Being an Irish journalist in the US: 'People are less vocal about supporting Trump than before'

IRISH JOURNALIST IN Boston, Hilary McGann, finds that at the moment, Donald Trump remains the number one subject her audience in Ireland is interested in.

The Limerick native, known as News By Hil on Instagram, has built a successful personal brand as a self-employed journalist and podcaster, focusing her reporting largely on geopolitics.

McGann, who has been based in Boston for the last three years, sat down with The Journal this week while we were in the city to report on the Irish government’s St Patrick’s Day programme in the States. 

On US president Donald Trump’s second term in office being the “number one thing” her audience is interested in, McGann said: 

“It’s funny, because when I worked at CNN, I joined just before his first term in office began, and I left the weekend before the 2020 election. So when I think about his first term, I think about it from a professional point of view at CNN, and the second term, I’ve been here in the US, and so it feels like more of the personal side of it,” McGann said. 

Before moving to Boston, McGann spent five years working for CNN in London, first as a researcher and then as a producer. 

When she was forced to take a break for health reasons, she found her entire attitude toward the news and the job she loved had shifted. 

“I was out for nearly six months, and right when I was trying to come back the pandemic [began], and I was getting ready to go back into work and feeling so overwhelmed with the amount of headlines and the constant pace of the news cycle.

“And it just felt so intimidating, so overwhelming, and I had this negative association with it.

“And something clicked in my head where I thought, if I’m feeling this way and I’m paid as a journalist, and I’m passionate about journalism, how must all my friends feel?”

It was this experience that led McGann to go out on her own, setting up her own company, NewsFix, which she now describes as a “bridge between news outlets and social media”.

After three years of running the company, McGann pivoted to her current endeavour, where she delivers the news on social media in a more personalised way.

Women aged 25-40 make up almost 90% of the 65,000 followers McGann has amassed on Instagram, with her page providing digestible updates, explainers and deep dives on some of the most topical stories of the day.

McGann blends a variety of different areas into her content, from the Royals and pop culture figures to explainers on geopolitical issues in the Middle East and interviews with authors on her Booked In podcast. 

On how she approaches what to cover, McGann explained that she was a producer on stories about the royals for a while during her time at CNN and so has something of a natural interest in it.

“So sometimes these days, I will look at royal stuff as more of a kind of break from the depressing news cycle, I’ll be honest.

“But my real love is geopolitics, international relations, US foreign policy, particularly US foreign policy in the Middle East, probably because I feel like there’s just no shortage of news and headlines.”

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One of the key things about McGann’s approach to the news that she believes makes it land well with her audience is that she brings them with her in her understanding of issues. 

“I guess that as I got a little bit older and a little bit more experienced, I kind of settled into knowing what I don’t know.

“Whereas when I started in CNN, I had come from Limerick, I was suddenly in this newsroom in London with all these incredible people: the children of ambassadors, who grew up all over the world, and all spoke seven languages. And I’m thinking, ‘What the hell do I know?’

“And there was this pressure to feel like you knew everything. And once I actually said, like, of course, you can’t know everything. I actually felt that that shift in tone and how I delivered the news really resonated with a lot of people,” McGann said. 

“It’s a fine line between never coming across as condescending, which I hope I never did, but also not assuming knowledge.”

On her experience of American life so far, McGann said she has made an effort to get to know people across the political spectrum in the States. 

Since being in Boston, she has noticed a change in how people voice their support for Trump.

She has found that a lot of people who would have voted for him in the last election are now reluctant to say that.

“And now when people see what’s happening with ICE, the cost of living here, a lot of people that might have voted for him might have done so on the idea of ‘America First’, but now they think, well, actually, what was the pretext for these strikes in Iran?

“What was the imminent threat? Was that verified? Where did that intelligence come from? And a lot of people are raising questions about that. And so it’s interesting to see the shift for sure.”

While McGann acknowledges that there is a “very real” atmosphere of fear among some Irish in the States at the moment, for her as a journalist, it’s been a fascinating time to be there.

“What I think is more telling is not necessarily how people like myself here already feel -  I think that’s very interesting, don’t get me wrong – I think the bigger story or the bigger impact is told in the people that are not moving here, in the immigration numbers that are down.

“How many well-educated people in Ireland are now saying, ‘Do you know what? I might go to Sydney instead, I might go to London instead, I might go to Dubai’ and I’m fascinated by what the impact of that might be in five years’ time, or in a decade.”

She added: “But that being said, there’s a very strong Irish community here. I feel very lucky.”

“I didn’t get to choose Boston, this was because of my husband’s job, and we always say he’s English, I’m Irish, and we end up in New England, where everyone’s Irish. And it really feels like you’re welcomed with open arms.

“People are almost competitive with you about how Irish they are. You feel the history. You can feel the respect for the history too.”

“Like even yesterday, now, not that my son cares, because he’s eight months old, but I walked him to the Famine Memorial, and even just to read that, it’s history that’s really appreciated and respected, and it’s nice to have a bit of that here,” McGann said. 

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