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.
But within days, the outrage faded. Jarislowsky Fraser’s morning gathering started featuring computer screens rather than a pulled-apart newspaper.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.
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. 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.
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.
When Report on Business debuted in the early 1960s, The Globe was a decidedly analog operation: Editors toiled on typewritten pages, sent to the press via pneumatic tubes, and if they needed to look something up they relied on staff at the in-house editorial library.In 1977, reporter Ellen Roseman writes The Globe’s first story to be produced on a new computer and video-terminal network, a step toward the digitized work model that would soon sweep through the world of business.
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.