Michael Curran is best known around town as the Ottawa Business Journal publisher. Still, that title doesn’t even describe the depth of work he has undertaken for the city's local business community and print media.
Michael also played a starring role in the lore of Ottawa At Home, having been one of the key figures behind its creation 20 years ago.
The entrepreneurial spirit defining his work has been with Michael since his earliest days in the media business. Coming out of Carleton University’s journalism school in the early 90s, he was cutting his teeth at the Orleans Star community newspaper but was quickly consumed by an undeniable ambition that he could build a better newspaper on his own.
“I was so displeased with how they were running things, and I was so cocky and arrogant that I got together with the sales manager and we left,” says Michael. “We raised a quarter million dollars from local investors, borrowed another quarter million dollars from the bank, and started our own weekly newspaper to compete against the Star.”
East-end readers will know that the Orleans Star still exists to this day, and Michael's startup paper does not. Ambition can only go so far, as the new paper quickly burned through their cash reserves in too much of a rush to compete. “We were completely naive, just so naive,” says Michael, shaking his head and smiling as he recalls those early days.
But he managed to exit unscathed by selling the business off to a national chain called Transcontinental (TC) Media.
This was how Michael found himself interviewing for the role of editor at the Ottawa Business Journal (OBJ). It was the late 90s and was when Michael first met his now longtime business partner, Mark Sutcliffe, who you might recognize as the current Mayor of Ottawa. Mark hired Michael, and they had massive ambitions to turn the business journal into a media powerhouse.
This was quickly followed by a series of unfortunate events. First the dot-com bubble burst, then 9/11 happened and the revenue taps dried up. OBJ managed to survive, however, by selling itself to the same TC Media group that bought Michael's failing Orleans newspaper.
This time, Michael stayed on at TC as a regional manager for the Ottawa area and continued overseeing the OBJ and a collection of community papers. The economy started bouncing back, and opportunities began to arise for new publications to join the company's lineup. Ottawa At Home was born.
In 2004, a talented businesswoman named Caroline Andrews set the wheels in motion to create a new magazine. Michael remembers Caroline as having an absolute passion for homes, food, and lifestyle. Ottawa At Home magazine (OAH) went into publication with pages reflecting all those things and more. OAH was doing well as a passion project, but Caroline was quickly promoted to a new role with TC Media in Toronto, leaving Michael in search of a new leader for the magazine.
“I still remember Mary coming into the boardroom that day, and there’s this fascinating contradiction taking place,” recalls Michael. “She’s saying, ‘I’m not a professional writer, I’m not an editor, I don’t know how to run a magazine’... But she was very confident at the same time. She was a doer. We thought she could do anything she put her mind to.”
Michael remembers watching Mary quickly take a somewhat muddled passion project and sharpen it into a much more precise vision of what the magazine needed to be — refining the business plan and honing the content to a point that perfectly understands the niche and the reader of the publication.
“At the end of the day, it just takes someone who can make things happen,” says Michael. “That was Mary Taggart.”
Not long after this transition, another financial crisis gripped the world, publishing revenues dried up again, and TC Media found themselves in yet another precarious situation. This is where Michael's journey comes full circle, and he teamed up with Mark Sutcliffe to found their own company, Great River Media. Now, they can buy the Ottawa Business Journal and take Ottawa at Home under their wing.
Of course, not long after this, the industry is shaken up yet again. Social media dominates traditional publishing; everyone is pivoting to video-based content. “We needed to get sharper and more focused to execute better on the potential around OBJ,” says Michael. “Well, obviously, Mary’s the natural new owner of Ottawa at Home.”
So, in 2015, the magazine changed hands for the last time, and Michael found that everything ended up exactly where it was always supposed to be.
“Mary just hit a home run with the magazine,” he says. “It’s just been wonderful to see the product mature over time, and I can’t believe, quite frankly, that it’s been 20 years already; it blows my mind.”
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