Dawn Calleja, Report on Business magazine editor.Daniel Ehrenworth/The Globe and Mail
John Daly is what we in the journalism business call a triple threat: a savvy reporter, a brilliant writer and a heckuva nice guy. Actually, make that a quintuple threat, because he’s also a savvy editor—the one who makes everyone’s copy sing—and the keeper of more financial arcana than you could imagine.
John was already a Report on Business magazine institution when I arrived in 2006. His career began in the mid-1980s, when he was an editor of the newspaper, an independent weekly at the University of Toronto. Fresh out of school and armed with an economics degree (plus a lifetime of investing smarts gleaned from his actuary dad), he landed at Maclean’s as a fact checker. “I think it’s because I could calculate percentages, and no one else on staff could,” John says wryly. After eight years and countless bylines, John was lured to “the other side”—a just-launched media services shop at a mutual fund company, where he spent four years building his already prodigious investing knowledge.
Then, in 1998, Conrad Black launched the National Post and sparked a vicious newspaper war that meant journalism jobs were suddenly plentiful. John was lured to ROB mag, then tucked away in a corner of The Globe and Mail’s old headquarters on Front Street, with a bustling staff of 12 and monthly issues with upwards of 200 pages. “I was pretty honoured when I started there,” John says, “because all the heavy hitters were in that newsroom. You really felt like you were at the centre of Canada.”
Trevor Cole was a senior editor when John made his debut. “At the time,” says Trevor, “the magazine was a pretty self-serious place. John was a strange new breeze blowing in. Though he clearly knew his stuff, he didn’t take himself at all seriously. He made every conversation about Bay Street or the economy seem like a bull session over beers.” (He was also remarkably chipper in the mornings, says Trevor, considering he often played late into the night as a guitarist.)
It was a wild time to be a business journalist in Canada. Traditional titans like Seagram, CanWest Global, Edper and the holy trinity of department stores (Hudson’s Bay, Eaton’s and Sears) still dominated, even as a new generation of tech upstarts began to take over the headlines (and the stock market). One such company was Nortel, whose supremacy was dramatic, albeit short-lived. “Nortel had split off from BCE Inc., and everybody thought, ‘Oh, this is the crown jewel, and boring old BCE is gonna disappear,’” says John. “And of course, the opposite happened.”
That’s one thing that strikes John, looking back over nearly 30 years at ROB: “It amazes me that analysts and money managers mostly still own the same 50 or 60 stocks,” he says. “You’d think it’d be a whole bunch of new companies, but Brookfield is basically the old Edper. The banks are still supreme. Some things change, and some things really do stay the same.”
After 28 years, John is retiring in June. The magazine, and the entire Globe, will be a different, less colourful place without his name on the masthead and his bespectacled face in the newsroom.
J.D., may your retirement be filled with late-night rock-’n’-roll gigs, late-morning sleep-ins and an abundance of cats.
We’ll miss you.