Interview: David Milstead

www.canadacolorado.com

David Milstead is a freelance financial journalist whose main client is the Globe and Mail. He worked there briefly as an employee in 2009 before deciding not to move his family to Toronto.

He was finance editor of Denver’s Rocky Mountain News, where he wrote about corporate finance, executive compensation, banking, pensions and accounting until the newspaper closed in February 2009. He joined the News in April 2001 from The Wall Street Journal, where he worked for the paper’s Southeast Journal regional section. Before that, he was business editor of a small daily in his native South Carolina and worked at a business journal in Cincinnati, Ohio.

David’s mother is from Saskatchewan. He has spent a portion of nearly every summer in Saskatoon, where he’s played more holes of miniature golf at the Putt ‘n’ Bounce on 8th Street than at any other mini-golf course. He obtained his Canadian citizenship in 1998, well before he knew that the U.S. financial system would collapse while Canada’s would not.

He is a graduate of Oberlin College in Ohio with majors in economics and political science. Milstead has individually or jointly won nine national awards from SABEW, the Society of American Business Editors and Writers, since 2002. He’s a frequent speaker on financial topics at SABEW conferences. He passed the Level I exam in the Chartered Financial Analyst program in December 2007.

David is married to Jennifer, a middle school teacher. They have a son, Elliott, who is two years old.

David is a lifelong Dodgers fan but claims the Blue Jays are his favorite American League team. He has more than 30,000 songs on his iPod and sees Ian Tyson every time he comes to Colorado.

Where is your place of birth?

Rock Hill, South Carolina, to a Saskatchewan mother and an American father.

Describe your family growing up.

I’m an only child and the only grandchild for both sets of grandparents. I was spoiled, but only with attention, since everybody in the family was a teacher or a farmer.

Did you have a particular lifestyle growing up?

My parents are PhD sociologists who settled in a small South Carolina town where the state teachers’ college (later a university) was located. I went to the poorer of the two high schools and was one of only a couple of kids out of 400 graduating to go to an out-of-state college.

What are/were your favorite activities/hobbies?

When I was eight years old, I discovered rock and roll and baseball. I haven’t developed any competing interests since. I ran out of room on my iPod at about 34,000 songs, and I run my own fantasy baseball league, made up mostly of journalists.

What are your family traditions?

My parents and I always hit the road in the summers and visited my grandparents, one set in New Jersey, the other in Saskatchewan. I gave up a lot of activities – band, playing baseball – because it was more important to me to see my grandparents. I didn’t realize then how strange and wonderful it was to have so much precious family time.

What is your fondest memory?

My grandfather lived in Tadmore, a town of about 40 in southeastern Saskatchewan. He worked for CN there before becoming a farmer. When we used to visit him, we could hear the trains coming from miles away. It gave me time to run out of the yard, through the intersection where no one was ever driving, and run down to the tracks to see the train and wave at the engineers.

What are your favorite foods?

My grandmother’s pyrohy (pierogies). The pyrohy skill seems to be diminishing each generation in our family. I’m a good cook, but I’m hopeless with dough. I like almost everything else, particularly sausages, red meat, pasta and cheese. That’s a problem.

Where did you attend school?

High school in Rock Hill, S.C.; college at Oberlin College outside Cleveland. Oberlin was the first American college to accept blacks and the first to accept women.

How did you meet your wife?

We worked at the same newspaper in South Carolina. She’s since left journalism and become a teacher.

Describe your professional career history.

Nothing but journalism since graduation in 1994, almost all of it financial journalism. I’ve worked in Cincinnati (love the chili) my hometown in South Carolina and in Denver. And Toronto, briefly.

Tell me about your company.

Hopefully, you all know the Globe and Mail. I was hired last year as a full-time employee, but realized I didn’t want to move my family to Toronto because of the cost of living and because my wife would have to give up a job she loves. So I returned to Denver, and I write for the Globe on a freelance basis. I can be found most often in the Globe Investor section of the Report On Business.

What is your proudest accomplishment?

When I passed the first level of the chartered financial analysts’ exam in December 2007, I told my boss, “This is the hardest thing I’ve eve done.” Then I had a child! Another proud accomplishment is serving as treasurer of the Denver Press Club and turning it around from insolvency in 2006 to the stable organization it is today. Most business journalists don’t get a chance to run a business – and succeed.

What is/was your biggest adaptation to the U.S.?

I’ll turn it around – my biggest adaptation to Canada was getting used to how civil the society was. Christie Blatchford’s columns about the couple suing the Ontario Provincial Police for their abandonment in the face of aggression by the local natives were just stunning to me. As we know, American police, for better or worse, don’t just stand by and do nothing when confronted by aggression.

What do you miss most about Canada?

I am quite fond of Saskatoon, where my grandmother still lives and where I’ve spent more than a year of my life, in sum. I love those prairie skies.

What are you looking for in the future?

A clearer picture of my professional future. I’ve taken steps to exit journalism and enter the finance sector, but I haven’t found a good match for me yet. I’m very skeptical of the future of professional journalism in this world of self-publishing and tweeting amateurs.

How did you hear about the Canada Colorado Association?

I attended an event a year or two before the Rocky Mountain News closed. My boss assigned me any Canada-related story because of my background.

What do you like most about the CCA?

It’s nice to have a local group that allows personal connections among people with the common tie of Canada. Canada is special and it’s nice to be able to celebrate it from here.

http://www.canadacolorado.com/canadacolorado.html

Interviewer: Pierre G. Boissé Date: September 8, 2010

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