Photojournalist bringing frontline news to media outlets

When we speak on the phone, Laois man and award-winning photojournalist John D McHugh is ruefully lamenting the noise of the builders next door to his home in Earlsfield, London, where he lives with his Irish wife and two young daughters. And well he might.

Having released the Verifeye Media app earlier this year, the entrepreneur uses his home as his office as he pumps every penny into his business, his visual news agency which delivers verified eyewitness film and photo content to media outlets worldwide.

McHugh admits himself that he only knows one business – journalism – but his decision to leave the “job of his dreams” was, he says, a natural progression.

"I remember leaving my wife when my daughter was six weeks old to go back to Afghanistan. I was never a bang-bang boy or an adrenalin junkie but I did love working on big stories. It's a big leap and I do get cabin fever." As well as his work with Verifeye Media, he also mentors on the MA journalism course in Goldsmiths University of London, "but it's a natural progression and the work I do mentoring students and ensuring the safety of some of our content providers is some salve to the fact I'm no longer on the front line of combat".

McHugh says Verifeye Media, which he established with chief technology officer Feargal Finnegan, provides verified content from a particular time, place and person and is "providing the tools journalists need with which to function" with veracity.

The video content collated by Verifeye Media is licensed regularly to news outlets such as the BBC, Sky News, the Telegraph, the Guardian, Buzzfeed and Mashable (which represent its biggest clients).

It is not the first time the self-taught photographer has launched a business but he says his earlier foray into entrepreneurship with a photo-watermarking app called Marksta taught him a lot about what not to do.

“I had an idea and it was a great trial run. We had 10,000 downloads in the first 48 hours, we were there at the right time. And I made a few quid off it but what I really learned was what not to do. It was developed on the fly while I was on $10 a minute satellite phone calls from Afghanistan to the developer. We made a whole lot of mistakes, so when it came to Verifeye Media, I made sure we spent a lot of time testing everything.”

Working from a spare room in London is a long way from being in the front line of combat in Afghanistan for McHugh. He worked extensively in the country from 2006. He was shot in the chest there in May 2007 on a joint patrol with US and Afghan troops in Nuristan.

“Afghanistan took forever to get to. I would spend on average two or three months on a job at a time. If you wanted to tell the real story, you had to do that. The country is so wild, the roads are practically non-existent and there were far fewer people reporting on it in the mid-2000s. It was known as the ‘Forgotten War’.”

In 2005, McHugh was selected by the Picture Editors Awards for a Special Award for News Photographer of the Year and in 2007 he won the Frontline Award.

Born to Irish parents in London, McHugh returned to Ireland as an infant and was brought up on a farm in Laois. Despite being in London for 20 years, he retains his accent and says he has a strong connection to Ireland, returning often to see relations. “We return to Ireland all the time and I really think that coming from a farm in Laois was a big part of my work in Afghanistan. That country defines me – it’s an agricultural society. I understand it.”

When not working on Verifeye Media, farming still features heavily in his life. “We have a small plot of land by Wandsworth prison, where we run a co-operative city farm. There are several other Irish people involved and we’ve raised pigs, butchered them, planted potatoes,and generally try to give our children some of the experiences we had ourselves growing up in Ireland.”

verifeyemedia.com