This is my last column in this space, so I beg your indulgence if I pay my dues and reminisce a bit. Discounting a short period when I worked as a freelancer, partly for Business Day but for other publications too, I’m one of the longest-serving employees of the paper.
But Owen hired me anyway a few years later; I think he liked the cheekiness of it, or perhaps he just wanted to get me back, because his editorship was fiercely demanding. Yet his attention to detail was fabulous, and his enormous personal integrity infused the newsroom with high ethical standards and true journalistic ambition that I think have never left it.
His editorship coincided with the paper’s glory years. Circulation was rising, money was flowing in, and the paper’s part ownership by the Financial Times group insulated it from the hurly-burly of what was to follow. I wish I could say I did better, but I think now the trajectory is turning upward again. Circulation has stabilised, and the paper is respectably but not especially profitable. But to get there was just brutal, so my first round of thanks goes, surprisingly perhaps, to the MD of publishing, Andy Gill, and Tiso Blackstar CEO Andrew Bonamour.