Journalists Corin and Liam Dann tell The Spinoff why they really, really love business.
The tears flowed on last Friday’s edition of Morning Report, as co-host Corin Dann finished seven years on the RNZ news show. Listeners won’t miss Dann’s voice though, because they’ll continue to hear him every morning as RNZ’s new business editor. He’s stoked to return to the world of official cash rate moves and daily market updates, and says he wants everyone to become as passionate about the economy as he is. “My goal is to fight the corner for business news and push it hard, and get people excited about it.”
Yes, Corin Dann is really, really excited about business, but he’s not the only Dann to feel that way. His older brother Liam is the business editor-at-large at the NZ Herald, and, like Corin, has spent the last two decades writing and talking about the rich and intriguing mysteries of the economy. Occasionally, they say, people get them confused. Of course they do! Two brothers becoming experts in the same industry on the same topic. How did that even happen?
In a way, the Dann brothers are as surprised about it as anyone. This is not what they imagined their adult lives would look like. They were self-described bogans, who grew up in Christchurch more focused on music and surfing than money and the economy.
As teenagers, they would drive around with their mates, listening to AC/DC and Metallica and drinking up in the hills. “There was a period where I just grew my hair long and wanted to surf and make pottery,” Liam recalls, while Corin remembers the time his brother went “full Jim Morrison”. “There was a great hippie phase before the bogan phase,” he says.
Even when they discovered journalism, Liam wanted to be a music journalist (he dabbles in DJing now) and Corin, inspired by his brother’s reporting, wanted to become a sports journalist. It was their other sibling, Corin’s twin Amy, who was the real business brain of the family – she now runs a successful bookkeeping company.
But, looking back, they can now see that the seeds of their future careers were planted early.
The brothers credit their primary school teacher parents with fostering an early love of information. Morning Report was constantly on the radio, while newspapers, Time magazines and The Listener were always scattered around the house. This was the 1970s and 80s and the big political moments of that era – Muldoon and carless days, the free market of the 80s, election nights on the television – played out in the background of their childhoods.
“We probably just took it for granted,” Liam remembers of growing up in a news and current affairs-aware family. “It was just always there, and Dad ranting at the TV news was just normal.”
Corin’s dream of being a sports journalist came true, after he landed a job as a sports reporter for RNZ, but it didn’t last long. “I was covering the 1998 rugby season, and the All Blacks lost five tests in a row. I just wasn’t coping,” he laughs.
That’s when he set his sights on the parliamentary press gallery, and political reporting roles with Newstalk ZB and RNZ soon followed. He fell into business reporting almost accidentally, after writing a few business pieces for RNZ that would lead him to become their economics correspondent. Later, Corin made the move to television and hosted TVNZ’s new early morning show Business, then presented Breakfast and Q&A, and was TVNZ political editor.
Liam, meanwhile, spent a couple of years reporting for community newspapers in Tauranga and Auckland before he headed to London in the late 90s for his OE. There, he worked in low-level banking jobs, soaking up his first introduction to the finance industry. “It was as much about learning to wear a suit and tie every day as it was about learning business,” he remembers. He returned to Aotearoa in the early 2000s and wore that same suit and tie to land a job in the business team at the Sunday Star-Times. It immediately felt like a natural fit, a fascinating new world to discover. “It wasn’t my world, but it was kind of an intellectual world, which there aren’t that many spaces for in modern journalism.”
Liam became business editor of the NZ Herald right as the global financial crisis hit in 2008, and watched as the finance news shifted from the back page of the newspaper to the very front. He remembers feeling sick to his stomach on the day Lehman Brothers went bankrupt. Explaining what was going on in the global economy had never been more important, nor more intense. Corin was also presenting a daily television show, despite having never worked in television before. “I really relied on Liam a lot at this time. I was freaking out… it was just carnage,” he recalls.
Since then, the pair have reported in parallel on the continually shifting tides of our economy, through events like Covid-19 pandemic, war in Gaza and Cyclone Gabrielle. Even as Corin’s new role brings their jobs even closer together, they reckon there’s no competitiveness or sibling rivalry. “His new job is business editor, whereas mine is business editor-at-large,” Liam deadpans.
Besides, they reckon, they don’t spend a lot of time at family get-togethers talking about the economy.“There’s usually a very intense burst of catching up on politics and economics,” Corin says. Liam reckons those discussions never last for long, though, as they quickly revert back to their roles as two bogan brothers from Cashmere. “We usually end up just talking music.”
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