Without Jonathan Underhill, there would never have been BusinessDesk.
He had the idea. He found and landed our first customer, and most importantly, he committed from the start in 2008 to “work very hard” to make our fledgling service succeed.
He would do so relentlessly for 10 years, his most valuable insight being that a news wire must create an aura of constancy and reliability. There must always be a sharemarket report, a dollar report, an overnight markets wrap and a “Stocks to Watch” column.
'Honeyed words'
That was the foundation of a wire service – selling the same news to multiple customers – that at various times sold its news to almost every mainstream NZ publisher, with the exception of Radio New Zealand, and to the Australian Associated Press. Yahoo!NZ, which in those days had huge traffic as the homepage for most Xtra email account holders, was our biggest customer for years.
The trouble was that we didn’t sell it to all those outlets at the same time, so that decade was an object lesson in running an under-capitalised small business that still paid its people, its taxes and its bills on time.
Cash flow was king and not always available. Wellington man-about-town Jason Krupp’s first job in NZ was with BusinessDesk, but we couldn’t keep him on.
Jonathan manfully accepted the task of delivering “honeyed words” that would ease the burden for Jason, except that he forgot to bring any money to pay for the coffee and was embarrassed about the task.
Jason says he ended up “firing myself” by telling Jonathan he knew he was being let go, and also paid for the coffee.
Jonathan was a great teacher of young journalists. One of NZ’s finest, BusinessDesk’s first employee, Paul McBeth, was sat by Jonathan and learned about stocks, bonds, currencies, securities regulation, commercial court, and how not to make mistakes.
Many others also benefited from his experience and talent for passing on his professional skills.
He was also relentlessly, often deeply inappropriately, amusing and a world-class exponent of the endlessly revolving dad joke.
If you told Jonathan about any sort of problem or inability to do something, anything really, he would respond: “Oh, is that because of your ‘whee-whoo’?” (imagine a whistling sound).
We got to know one another in the early 1990s when we shared an office in the press gallery at Parliament with lifer Ian Templeton. Jonathan was with the Sunday Star-Times, and I was the NZ correspondent for The Australian.
Ill-defined consultancy
Jonathan was quite a tabloid newshound back then. He once pursued a man so relentlessly about some scandal at Mangaroa prison in Hawke's Bay that he tracked the guy down in the bath for a two-hour interview that blew the story wide open.
He had evidence for a follow-up on the S&M-related death of Peter Plumley-Walker that he could never publish.
He moved to the National Business Review’s gallery office, where he drove then-bureau editor Vernon Small a bit mad and incessantly played a very early online video game with fellow NBR staffer and soon-to-be Scoop founder Alastair Thompson.
We lost touch when he went to Bloomberg, moved to Sydney, started a family with his fellow former Dominion staffer Jane Shanahan, and reached the status of top Asian editor – a big wheel in a very well-oiled financial wire service machine.
When he wanted to return to NZ, they let him do the same job from Wellington.
In 2008, he’d been at Bloomberg for about 11 years, and the attraction of incessantly feeding a global business news service was palling.
He joined me in a shabby office in the Harbour City Centre, on Brandon St in Wellington, where we made a brief and abortive attempt to start our own ill-defined consultancy.
I would leverage my corporate comms skills, having just left a brand and comms role at Contact Energy, and he would offer financial analysis using the sophisticated tools of “the Bloomberg”, which he rather missed and wanted to have an excuse to afford.
No one was interested.
Our partners were unimpressed.
Then Jonathan came across a small NZ finance news publisher that had recently parted ways with the NZ Press Association and needed a business news service.
We decided to try that, picked up some other small-beer customers, took a contract to caption picture stories beaming into airport lounges in NZ and Australia for serial entrepreneurs Leon and Stephen Grice, and BusinessDesk was born.
BusinessDesk's first office on moving day, September 2012. Jonathan Underhill at left, Hannah Lynch (now head of comms at Synlait, centre), and a youthful Paul McBeth on the right. (Image: BusinessDesk)
The first few years were wild and not very pecuniary, but we survived. The global financial crisis taught us, and covid-19 would re-teach us, that demand for reliable business and economic news rises during bad times.
Our office cleaning workforce consisted of our children. I believe all six of them cleaned the office or did other work for BusinessDesk at one stage or another.
By the mid-2010s, BusinessDesk started making some money. At least two dividends were declared around the middle of the decade, but it was hard work. The loss of a string of customers in 2017 and 2018 presented the most serious of the periodic existential crises the business had faced.
Through all of this, Jonathan worked like a Trojan to keep the wire lively, the news-editing process reliable and legally safe, and to write accurate, timely business news in a no-nonsense, consistent style that bore a remarkable resemblance to Bloomberg’s.
We spent long hours relentlessly delivering “proof of life” for a product that was both a commodity and a bespoke item every time we wrote a new story.
By 2018, Jonathan had had enough, and fair enough.
Pipedreams
I returned from a family holiday in Peru to discover that when he’d emailed to say he was leaving and would like some time off before starting other work, it turned out he meant he was leaving that day.
Our friendship, by then, was under terrific strain. A failing small business started by accident by two friends had long since stopped being fun.
As a result, Jonathan just missed the defining event that took BusinessDesk from the cottage industry to the premium subscription service it is today – the arrival of Brian Gaynor, who also sadly departed too soon as an investor.
If there had been no Jonathan, there would have been no Brian and no business.
One of Jonathan’s great pipedreams was that he would, fairly shortly, move to the country and start a pig farm. Between bouts of dieting and frenetic exercise regimes, he would constantly be eyeing up rural real estate. Pōrangahau seemed to come up a lot.
He craved at some level a simpler, more earthy life. He was proud of his Raukawa whakapapa and began to embrace it publicly, and he loved his kids.
It’s a shame that he never did buy that plot of land.
● Jonathan Underhill died this week after a short battle with cancer.
