Our Man In Stockholm

With parallel careers as a professional footballer and a pop star, Swedish-Irish Kevin Walker looks to have it all. His league and cup titles sit alongside his best-selling albums as major achievements that most would be envious of, but his success has come about as a result of a lifetime of hard work and overcoming a bout of blood poisoning that almost killed him. Yet again his career is at a cro...

As 2020 puts on its coat and heads for the door, it leaves behind one story which has dwarfed all others this year - the Covid-19 pandemic. Many businesses and workers have been hit, and amongst the worst affected has been journalism. But while some of the ill effects have been down to the pandemic, many were simply magnifications of broken business models and mismanagement that still plague the m...

Almost a week has past since Argentinian icon Diego Maradona died of a heart attack, sparking a period of grief and mourning around the world as a man who transcended sport - and sometimes life itself - was lost to us. Having been named after him, Diego Abatecola idolised Maradona as much as any other football fan, and he joined me from Buenos Aires to talk to me about the void left by the passing...

Emma Coolen is a football-loving multimedia producer whose social media skills landed her a dream job with the Dutch team at the Women's World Cup in France - what few people knew was that her other dream was to play for them. After changing her life at the age of 20 she was well on the road to a professional career when another dream opportunity came up as part of a BT Sport TV series about women...

As a kid Pannie Kianzad wasn't one for team sports, preferring the solitude of the swimming pool to more social setting of the soccer pitch. And when she and her girlfriends were trying to find a way to keep fit, she didn't let their lukewarm feelings for trying out boxing turn her off - she went along and tried it by herself, and it has taken her all the way to a career as a professional mixed ma...

A former intern for then-senator Hilary Clinton back in 2006, Noel Rock was elected to Ireland's parliament but retained his interest in American politics, and he joined me to pick over the results, the rhetoric and the road to recovery in the wake of what turned out to be a presidential election for the ages.

As America still counts its votes, I sought the counsel of two women in the media that I have enormous respect for - Áine O'Neill, an Irishwoman who has recently moved to Los Angeles, and Stephanie Brumsey, a Black journalist who works in New York and covered the Trump inauguration. They told me what the atmosphere is like on both coasts, and how - still - hope of a better future is what will help...

As a teenager Johanna Karlsson got so far under the skin of a local newspaper editor that he gave her an album to review to see if she could do it better. Turned out she could, and thus a career in journalism was born. Johanna has always taken the road less travelled, and one of her best-known stories centred on the restaurant business in Malmö and how power, money and influence rooted in the rest...

For ten years Sweden's Jonas Jerebko carved out a career as one of the 450 players in the toughest, most competitive basketball league in the world - the NBA. A gritty, hard-scrabble player as a rookie, he added a silky outside shot and became a key part of teams that made it to the conference finals in both the East and the West, and he came tanatalisingly close to winning a championship ring wit...

The history of Northern Ireland is bloody, complicated and understood by few, and it has often been told by outsiders. No longer. Documentary-maker Seán Murray tells the stories of his community in West Belfast, talking to the victims of violence and exposing the bigotry, brutality and sheer bloody-mindedness that was at the heart of the conflict. Yet in an era where much crowing is done about fre...

Dublin in the late 80s was a hotbed of creativity and, for a while at least, no band was hotter than Guernica. Starting out in the mould of Joy Division and New Order, they morphed into a powerful live band driven by guitars and synths, and the rock-solid rhythm section of Darragh Broe on drums and Derek Lee on bass. At the mic stand was Joe Rooney, who later later find fame as a comedian and acto...

As journalists and editors we have a terrible habit of making the same mistakes over and over and over again, especially when it comes to reporting on the far right. We think we are showing them up for the buffoons they are, but we are actually giving legitimacy to ideas that should have been dead and buried at the end of the second World War. This week's podcast outlines the seven deadly sins of...

Long hailed as a paragon of social democracy, Sweden is one of the only countries in the world - perhaps the only - where limited companies can profit from running schools. In a free-market project based on schools vouchers that proved a step too far even for Augusto Pinochet's Chile, pupils are treated as customers and choice is paramount. But while all that sounds good to parents and indeed shar...

On the whole, fear is a good thing - it's what helps us stay alive in dangerous situations. But it's also used to manipulate how we think, how we feel - and how we vote. Arash Javanbakht is an associate professor at Wayne University, and he is an expert in fear, trauma and PTSD. He explained the nuts and bolts of fear to me, how it works in the tribal context and what that means for the upcoming A...

John Karalis of MassLive.com and the Locked On Celtics podcast joined me to talk about Black Lives Matter, the NBA bubble and how the players are exerting their power of American politics as the election approaches.

Covid has played havoc with the work of journalists, especially those of us involved in sports. I talked to Second Captains football kingpin Ken Early about nostalgia, crowd noise and having your calendar Tipp-Exed out of existence by the pandemic.

As you will no doubt be aware, I'm trying to fund a project to do "Outside It's America," which is 50 podcasts from America's 50 states in 50 days, ending up in New York on polling day in the presidential election there. No-one likes to support something sight unseen (or indeed sound unheard!), so this week's podcast is something of a prequel - an interview I recorded a few years back with Angus M...

A quiet few weeks is about to get a lot busier as a secret project reaches the starting gate - listen to find out more.

Reporting on sexual violence is complex and knowing who owns the story and what it means to them is key to doing it justice. Student journalist Kamron Clarke has written brilliantly about the phenomenon.

The Black Lives Matter movement has made people of colour more visible and offered new opportunities for them to make their voices heard - is this a turning point, or a flash in the pan? Broadcaster and public speaker Wuraola Majekodunmi joined me to talk about how she sees modern Irish media and where it's headed.

As a child Paul Howard dreamed of covering a World Cup - luckily for him, that dream came true as a journalist, but it turned out to be a lot different to what he expected. One of Ireland's most successful authors, Paul spoke to me to share some memories of covering sporting events around the globe...

Some reflections on modern media, culture and "cancelling", and why racism is not a Black people problem - it's a white people problem, and it's ours to solve.

Born in Cairo to a family of diplomats, Heba Habib got used to developing different perspectives. As a journalist now living in Sweden during the Covid -19 pandemic, she has observed the similarities and differences as societies she knows well struggle to cope for a variety of different reasons. She joined me in the #OMIS studio to talk about her work and how it is being affected by a world consta...

Among anyone who knows anything about MMA media, Esther Lin is widely acknowledged as the GOAT - the Greatest Of All Time - among combat sports photographers. Soft-spoken yet uber-competitive, she told me about her background as a documentary-maker, how she got into photography and how storytelling is an integral part of taking and making photos.

Photographer Kai Pfaffenbach recently won a Nobel prize together with his Reuters colleagues for his coverage of the pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong. He told me about being self-taught, surviving in the field, and how the art of taking a great news photo is sometimes as simple as being in the right place at the right time.