Stephen Rae (editor)

Biography

From County Kerry, Rae attended the DIT School of Journalism, qualified as a barrister-at-law at King's Inns, Dublin, has a diploma in Criminology from DIT, and is studying for the Directors Programme, at the Management School, Cranfield University, UK.

Rae is a former trustee of the Burma Relief Fund, which raised funds for the survivors of Cyclone Nargis in 2008, and a trustee of the John Giles Foundation. He is an external advisory board member of FuJo, Dublin City University’s institute for Future Media & Journalism.

He was Young Journalist of the Year in 1985 and subsequently became a freelance journalist for a range of national newspapers. He spent a period as editor of the Garda Review (the monthly magazine of the national police force), before becoming crime correspondent for the "Evening Herald". In this role he was one of the first journalists to reveal the emergence of witnesses to planning corruption in Dublin, a controversy that led to the establishment of the Mahon Tribunal of Inquiry. A number of news executive roles, including news editor, deputy editor, travel editor, followed before Rae became acting editor of the Evening Herald in September 2005, before being appointed editor under INM Group Chief Executive Sir Anthony O’Reilly in May 2006.

He was appointed editor of INM's flagship title, the Irish Independent, Ireland’s biggest selling quality newspaper in September 2012. He was later promoted to group editor-in-chief, a new role created especially for him.

While editor of the Irish Independent, Rae oversaw the ending of its publication as a broadsheet, allowing it to formally adopt a more tabloid approach. He was responsible for publishing the award winning Anglo Tapes, which exposed damning phone calls made by senior Anglo Irish Bank executives prior to Ireland’s financial crash in 2008. It was the first major joint print-online play by a national title in Ireland and led to condemnation of the Anglo saga by German chancellor Angela Merkel. More recently, Rae has overseen the development of an online led newsroom, which has made Independent.ie Ireland’s largest news site with an average audience of 10,000,000 monthly users. He also drove the investigative reporting following the Regency Hotel Shootings and subsequent reprisals in 2016.

Rae has spoken at the Dublin Web Summit about the future of journalism, at Wan-Ifra’s Publish Asia event in Bangkok in April 2015 on newsroom transformation., and at the 68th World News Media Congress, and 23rd World Editors Forum, June 2106 in Cartagena, Colombia.

As editor-in-chief at INM, he reportedly sacked journalist Gemma O'Doherty after she made an attempt to interview Garda Commissioner Martin Callinan. at his home at 10pm, April 11, 2013. This was ignored by the mainstream media in Ireland, as noted by media in Great Britain. It was later claimed that Rae himself was among those to have had penalty points annulled. These claims were ignored by the Irish media and only reported either on social media or internationally.

On the evening of Saturday 19 July 2014, Rae, in his role as group editor of INM, ordered the presses to be stopped to amend a column written by Sunday Independent editor Anne Harris which featured references to Denis O'Brien. Copies of the original article did however appear, allowing comparisons between the two. Harris originally wrote: "Denis O'Brien is the majority shareholder in INM. In theory, with 29% of the shares, he does not control it. In practice, he does." The last sentence was deleted and the wording of the next paragraph about O'Brien was also amended. Harris left the newspaper in December 2014, with praise from her colleagues.