Journalist and academic Scott Lucas sits down with Daire Lydon to discuss his career journey, EA WorldView, and his advice for students.
Scott Lucas has built a career that spans continents, disciplines, and media. Now a Professor of International Politics at the Clinton Institute in UCD and Professor Emeritus at the University of Birmingham, he also leads the international analysis site EA WorldView. His academic work examines political shifts in the US and UK and extends across regions such as the Middle East, Iran, Europe, and Asia. Journalism has been a constant thread since he began reporting at sixteen, contributing over the years to outlets including the Guardian, The Independent, and the New Statesman before founding EA WorldView in 2008. Today he is a regular contributor to global radio and television, offering analysis for RTE, BBC, Sky, Al Jazeera English, France 24, Deutsche Welle, CBC, TVP World, PTV World, NDTV, WION, Newstalk, Virgin Media News, and many others.
Few careers move in straight lines. Lucas’s path shows how a restless curiosity, a willingness to work hard, and a refusal to be boxed into one discipline can build a life that spans academia, frontline journalism, and international media analysis.
Lucas, now a Professor of Political Science at UCD and one of the most frequently quoted analysts on radio and television in Ireland and beyond, laughs when asked what he was like in school.
“I was a pain in the neck,” he jokes. “A geeky kid who wanted to play sports but didn’t have the build for it.”
That playful understatement hides the intensity of his early drive. By the age of 11 he was working as a scorekeeper at youth baseball games. At 14 he was the equipment manager and statistician for his high school’s American football team. Alongside that came national-level debating, writing for the school paper, college bowl competitions (US equivalent of the University Challenge) , even the maths team.
And at 16 came the moment that changed everything.
He sent a portfolio to a small newspaper in his Alabama hometown. They hired him. He suddenly found himself covering local football, community stories, stock-car racing, and university soccer teams with wildly different playing styles and international backgrounds.
“It was the first big lesson. You get experience wherever you can. Don’t wait for the perfect opportunity. Just start.”
Discovering the wider world
Lucas’s early fascination with journalism sat beside frustration with his university experience. After one year at Vanderbilt University in the US he leapt at the chance to study abroad for a year. Leeds in 1981 was grim, political, alive with culture, and for Lucas, electrifying.
He immersed himself in British politics, Northern Ireland, and the debates shaking Thatcher’s Britain. It was also the year Leeds United were relegated. He remembers standing on the Elland Road pitch in a chaotic post-match invasion, thinking they had survived.
“They didn’t. But it was unforgettable.”
That year transformed him. He returned to the US briefly, rejected pressure to go to law school, and moved back to the UK to pursue postgraduate study in London. The city in the eighties was turbulent and politically engaged. Every weekend he found himself outside embassies protesting apartheid or US interventions in Central America. He debated figures like Charles Kennedy at the LSE. And he immersed himself in music, culture, and British media.
The shift back to journalism
Academia provided structure, but Lucas missed the immediacy of day-to-day reporting. Publishing academic books took years. The world was changing faster than the publishing cycle could match. With the wars of the early 2000s unfolding, he returned to journalism through the New Statesman. One of his early pieces argued that to understand US foreign policy, you had to understand professional wrestling’s narratives of heroes and villains.
“They published it. And once they did, doors opened.”
In 2008, as the Obama campaign gained momentum, Lucas co-founded EA WorldView, the site that still defines much of his journalistic identity. Social media was beginning to reshape reporting. When the Mumbai attacks happened later that year, local residents were posting updates online while international journalists remained outside the cordon.
“That was the moment I knew. You could cover events anywhere in the world in real time if you knew how to listen to the people living through them.”
EA WorldView, run entirely by volunteers, became known for live coverage of Iran’s 2009 protests, the Arab Spring, conflicts in Gaza, and political shifts across the world. The site’s readership is modest, but its influence is significant. The New York Times and other major outlets routinely cite its reporting.
When Social Media Became the Frontline
Lucas remembers the moment he realised how completely the landscape of reporting had changed. A colleague had insisted he join Twitter, something he initially shrugged off. Then, during the 2008 Mumbai attacks, he opened the app and found first-hand accounts pouring out from people trapped inside hotels and restaurants while traditional media were kept outside police cordons. It was the first time he saw social media become a lifeline for eyewitness reporting, and it convinced him that journalists anywhere in the world could cover fast-moving crises if they listened to the people living through them.
Teaching, media work, and UCD
Alongside journalism came teaching. Lucas began developing courses on propaganda in the late eighties, which later evolved into his well-known modules on new media, digital storytelling, and political communication. That work now continues at UCD, where he teaches postgraduate students from more than a dozen countries.
He has also become a regular voice on global radio and television, often doing five or six broadcast interviews a day. One moment he is discussing Vladimir Putin’s diplomatic moves with Indian networks. Minutes later German broadcasters are asking him about unfolding scandals. This week he spent an entire day with RTÉ analysing the Americans detained in Moscow.
“What I love is the cultural learning. Every media ecosystem has its own habits and expectations. Ireland is very different from the UK. The media community here is far more grounded, far more dependable.”
He adds, without hesitation, that UCD is the strongest university community he has worked in across his career.
Advice for students: curiosity over perfection
Asked what he would tell someone trying to enter journalism today, Lucas is blunt. “You don’t do it for the money. You follow your interest. You don’t write what you think people want you to write. You pursue the things that make you curious.”
He believes students should start small and start now, as he did at 16. Learn to write clearly. Learn to communicate. Build reliability into your habits. And never let anyone tell you that your way of engaging with news is wrong.
“You don’t need to understand everything. You need to choose the topics you care about, build a reliable network, and create a space where you can think clearly. It’s like good friendships. You want sources that don’t lie to you.”
He also pushes back against older commentators who dismiss TikTok or Instagram as unserious. “People enter news through TikTok and Insta all the time. There is nothing wrong with that. The key is knowing how to judge reliability and how to cut through people talking nonsense.”
What he’s proudest of
Without hesitation, Lucas names EA WorldView.
“We did it because we believed stories needed to be covered and voices needed to be heard. It didn’t help our careers in any official way. But it mattered. It still matters.” He points to the need to hear from people in Ukraine, Gaza, Israel, or anywhere shaped by conflict or disinformation.
“We wanted to build a way to learn from people and work with them. And that’s what still drives me.”
A model for careers built on openness
Lucas’s story is a reminder to students that careers in media, academia, or global affairs rarely follow a straight line. His path was shaped by saying yes to odd jobs, following deep interests, and refusing to let disciplines confine him.
It is also a story about starting early, staying curious, and not waiting for permission to begin. For any UCD student trying to build a life in journalism or political communication, that lesson alone is worth carrying forward.