This is an excerpt from A Nation’s Paper: The Globe and Mail in the Life of Canada, a collection of history essays from Globe writers past and present, coming this fall from Signal/McClelland & Stewart.
“You ruined my morning. And the morning of everyone I work with.”
Not the feedback a Report on Business reporter wanted to hear after asking the head of one of the country’s largest money managers – Len Racioppo, then-president of Jarislowsky Fraser Ltd. – what he thought of the reimagined Globe and Mail delivered to his office early on the morning of April 23, 2007.
Months of brainstorming, countless mock-ups and significant consulting fees went into the newspaper Racioppo just panned. The new business section, rolled out with a retooled ROB website that was chock-a-block with stock market data, represented The Globe’s latest, best attempt to retain its core readers, who treasured their daily paper, while staying relevant to an increasingly digital audience. A lot was riding on the redesign.
A pile of Globe business and front-page sections from 2007 show the new look of the newspaper that dramatically changed how market information was presented.Arantxa Cedillo/Veras
What exactly wrecked the money manager’s morning? Racioppo, whose team managed $45-billion of clients’ savings, explained that early each workday, Jarislowsky Fraser fund managers arrived at the Bay Street office, poured a coffee, gathered around the boardroom table and spread out the pages of the ROB containing the previous day’s stock prices, currency and interest rates. While sipping from their mugs, some of the country’s most influential investors would check what went up and what went down, looking for patterns and exchanging observations on the markets. Those early morning sessions were central to the firm’s culture and “helped determine our activities during the day,” he says now.
The reimagined Report on Business stripped much of the market data from the pages of the newspaper, moving it to a website featuring real-time stock moves, as opposed to yesterday’s prices. In place of stock listings, the print edition of The Globe cleared space for additional articles from reporters strung across Canada, the United States and other foreign bureaus.
Sacrificed in the redesign were the neatly packaged, daily stock charts that served as touchstones in the lives of countless readers, including Racioppo. That triggered a brief moment of grousing from the fund manager, mirrored by angry e-mails from hundreds of subscribers.
But within days, the outrage faded. Jarislowsky Fraser’s morning gathering started featuring computer screens rather than a pulled-apart newspaper.
The Globe's first edition from March 5, 1844.
In 1844, Globe founder George Brown packaged a few stories into a section called “Financial Intelligence” that was delivered to Toronto’s fledgling finance community – the country’s commercial heart was in Montreal – and an equally small number of prosperous farmers surrounding the city. He also anticipated his readers’ interest in national stories, and future bureaus in Calgary and Vancouver, by printing a “Western Globe” in 1845, from an office in London, Ont., 200 kilometres down the road.
The story of business journalism at The Globe is the story of Canada’s economy moving, in fits and starts, from backwater colony to undersized but plucky global player. While the stand-alone Report on Business section that Racioppo tore apart each morning is a relatively recent creation – launched in 1962 – the concept of authoritative, timely coverage of Canadian commerce has always been among The Globe’s top priorities. Historically, the newspaper has dominated this market.
Its ability to stay relevant to business readers, long after the last printing press goes silent, will be a crucial factor for the company’s future. As Report on Business goes, so goes The Globe.
Reporters, by and large, see themselves as outsiders. When it comes to covering corporate CEOs, or premiers and prime ministers, the newspaper plays the role of watchdog or whistle-blower, sometimes scolding, occasionally cheeky, always aiming to serve the public interest.
The Globe’s founders and several generations of owners would have snorted out their snuff at the suggestion that their newspaper served a public interest. One bought a newspaper, historically, to further one’s political or business ambitions.
That was certainly the case with Brown, founder of the federal Liberal Party, elected politician and a Father of Confederation. He launched The Globe in the 1840s to boost his party and attack the Conservatives, led by the country’s future prime minister, Sir John A. Macdonald.
Owning The Globe proved an effective tool. The newspaper helped bring down Macdonald’s Conservative government in 1873 over allegations of illegal fundraising, in what became known as the Pacific Scandal.
By the time the Depression took hold in the 1930s, The Globe was a blunt instrument for creating wealth. Publisher George McCullagh, who merged the Liberal-leaning Globe with the Conservative-backing Mail and Empire in 1936, used his position at the paper to help build a personal fortune from trading stocks and to forge political ties. In his 1992 history of The Globe, Power and Influence, author David Hayes described McCullagh as “a capitalist who believed that politics was just a subsidiary branch of business.”
The Globe’s business coverage got an even bigger boost from McCullagh’s main financial backer, William Wright, who struck it rich as a prospector. When he decided to back McCullagh, Wright insisted on just one condition: expand the newspaper’s business pages. “Anything that is of advantage to mining is of advantage to the country as a whole,” Wright declared.
Globe business coverage got a big boost under the editorship of Oakley Dalgliesh.Ashley & Crippen
The seeds for what sprouted into the country’s dominant business section were planted in 1948 when Oakley Dalgleish became The Globe’s editor. A native of small-town Canada – born in New Liskeard, Ont., and raised in Moose Jaw – Dalgleish learned the business in part by reporting for London’s Fleet Street papers before joining The Globe in 1934 as a reporter covering railways and hotels.
When Dalgleish took the wheel, the story of the Canadian economy was one of farms, fishing, forestry and the occasional mine. In 1940, manufacturing accounted for only one in four jobs. And a third of the population lived in rural settings – now, just one in 10 Canadians are outside major cities.
As the postwar industrial boom kicked off, The Globe chronicled the transformation of both an economy and a society by covering the introduction of computers and advances in telecom.
The newspaper provided context to the debut of Canada’s first mainframe computer at the University of Toronto in 1949 by explaining: “It will be able to compute income taxes; to tell the trend of business at an electrified glance; to play a passable game of chess, and maybe even to forecast weather months in advance.” The Globe reporter proved prescient on tech’s coming role in commerce, if not the accuracy of weather predictions.
The Globe debuted a new, stand-alone section: Report on Business. For a modern audience, accustomed to colour photos and graphics, the ROB’s grey front page was a slog. It relied on data-driven stories – “TSE Sets Trading-Value Record” one headline read – anchored by a feature on a five-way merger among concrete producers. The only light touch was a photo of the latest French cruise ship, over the headline, “Trouble For Queens,” a reference to Britain’s luxury liners.
In the 1960s, Canada’s biggest business stories were in the auto sector, which took off after former prime minister Lester Pearson dropped by president Lyndon Johnson’s Texas ranch in 1965 to sign the Auto Pact. In addition to covering the sector, the Report on Business pages became a forum where industry leaders fought battles for public opinion.
The first Report on Business edition from Feb. 6, 1962.
The first print run demonstrated ROB could help The Globe fulfill its long-held claim to being Canada’s national newspaper, rather than one of many Toronto broadsheets. Dalgleish commissioned an extra edition printed on lightweight paper, which was loaded on to airplanes for delivery across the country on the day of publication. (The airmail network lasted until the 1980s, when The Globe began using satellite transmission to print across the country.)
Dalgleish initially published ROB on Tuesdays and Fridays, with plans to add more days if the launch was successful. ROB proved a huge hit with advertisers – by the 1970s, the section was winning 90 per cent of lucrative career ads – and justified being part of each daily edition.
The first stand-alone ROB in 1962 also featured on its front a blurb explaining The Globe had struck partnerships with foreign publishers, including the Financial Times of London, to ensure readers had access to breaking news from around the world. In the 1960s, foreign-owned companies controlled the domestic economy and Canadians were still working out their national identity. Running stories supplied by international outlets fit the spirit of the times.
The ROB spent the 1970s and early 80s broadening the concept of what counts as a business story. Editors established dedicated workplace and environmental beats, and launched a Report on Technology. Business reporters worked in bureaus across the country, telling national stories through a regional lens.
Under editor Ian Carman, the section forged a reputation for being thorough and thoughtful, both admirable qualities, but dreadfully dull. Corporate earnings were dutifully covered, corporate personalities were largely ignored. “That huge societal changes had taken place by the early 1980s was scarcely evident in the pages of the ROB; it spoke almost exclusively to male executives and their princes in waiting,” Hayes said. “The ROB failed to probe beneath the surface of business life in a systematic way, identifying long-term trends and providing analysis.”
Somewhere in history, a brave priest pointed out the Bible might find wider readership if published in languages other than just Latin. In the same vein, Carman’s successors, Tim Pritchard and Margaret Wente, pushed the newsroom to do something heretical: make coverage more interesting. Editors, and the advertising and subscription teams, wanted an ROB that appealed to a wide, if affluent, audience. Drawing on magazine-editing skills – honed in flashy, often CEO-focused features in the monthly Report on Business magazine, which debuted in 1984 – Wente pushed for stories featuring tension, you’re-in-the-room insight and, most of all, personality.
“It helped that the 1980s saw the emergence of larger-than-life Canadian personalities like Robert Campeau and the Reichmann family, who made for compelling reading,” Wente says. On her watch, business reporters became some of the highest-profile and highest-paid print journalists in the country, as The Globe and rivals waged a war for talent. “Before the 1980s, reporters were sent to the business section if they couldn’t cut it on political or foreign coverage,” Wente says. “ROB was considered a backwater.”
Business leaders bridled at what for many was their first taste of critical coverage. The chairman of CIBC demanded a meeting with Wente, ROB editor, and the publisher of The Globe to complain about coverage of problems in the bank’s loans to the Reichmanns’ real estate company, Olympia and York. Early in the meeting, it became clear Globe reporters knew more about the secretive family’s finances than the bank executive. The ROB continued to probe the Reichmann empire, and CIBC lost hundreds of millions of dollars when Olympia and York filed for bankruptcy in 1992.
Looking back on the era, Wente says the ROB made two significant shifts that successfully boosted readership: The section embraced investigative-style journalism and added personal finance coverage for do-it-yourself investors. “There was a spirited newsroom debate around offering readers advice on their investments, with a vocal faction saying we should avoid taking any responsibility for what people did with their money,” she says.
Again, what was then radical is now traditional at The Globe. Personal finance columnists such as Rob Carrick and John Heinzl count among the platform’s most-read writers. In 2022, ROB editor Gary Salewicz revamped the section by adding personal finance writers at the expense of one of the few remaining pages of stock charts. He received far fewer abusive e-mails than his predecessor.
The daily ROB faced its first real competitive challenge in 1988, when the Financial Post began publishing a daily tabloid, backed by its new parent, the Toronto Sun chain. The Post featured short news stories and spicy, pro-business columnists. In 1998, Conrad Black bought the Post and folded it into a right-leaning broadsheet, the National Post, aimed at dethroning The Globe as the country’s first read.
The newspaper war served readers well and boosted the fortunes of business journalists. But by the end of the 1990s, it became clear the dailies were fighting the wrong battle. They faced an existential challenge from the internet. In 2000, The Globe launched globeandmail.com, an online version of the newspaper with a heavy emphasis on business content.
ROB reporters won countless awards for covering the tech disruption undermining the newspaper’s business model. The rise and stunning falls of Nortel Networks and smartphone pioneer BlackBerry were covered in dramatic detail, as was the dot-com market crash at the beginning of a new century, and the global financial crisis that began in 2007.
The Globe, like most print-based platforms, made early mistakes in rolling out an online strategy by allowing free access to content, on the theory digital advertising would pay the bills. As the sector matured, it became clear that search engines such as Google and social-media site Facebook were winning the bulk of digital ad dollars.
In the same 2007 Globe redesign that upset Jarislowsky Fraser’s morning coffee routine, business editor John Stackhouse announced a shift in mindset: The online version of the ROB was on equal footing with the print edition. Again, in what seemed radical and is now commonplace, Stackhouse said the digital product and the morning paper were “not separate publications. They’re run out of the same newsroom by the same journalists, using the best of the printed page and the Web.”
Today’s ROB, like the entire Globe, reaches the majority of readers as a digital product, and earns the bulk of its revenues through payments from readers. Print subscribers have gone from reading Brown’s few lines of Financial Intelligence to receiving e-mail alerts on stories from journalists who are increasingly digital natives. The ROB is going where readers and the country are headed, racing to stay relevant in a global economy, where the advantage belongs to those with the best access to information and news. That’s a contest the ROB, and Canada, can win.
Andrew Willis is a columnist for Report on Business.
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