Obituary: Mark Nichols

Nichols worked for Reuters from 1964 to 1968, translating the file into North American-friendly usage, after spending four years with The Canadian Press wire service in Toronto.

“He was a big influence on my life, especially at Nordesk in the 1960s, where I saw him as the personification of the journalist that I – with six months of experience at CP under my belt – wanted to be,” journalist Robert Marshall said.

During his time as a writer for Time Canada from 1969 to 1977, Nichols was inducted into the Canadian News Hall of Fame in 1971. He became editor of the Imperial Oil Review from 1978 to 1980 and then served as a section editor at Maclean’s, Canada's weekly news magazine, from 1983 to 2000, overseeing Canada news and, later, technology and science.

“There really wasn't an assignment that Mark could not handle or a subject that he could not distill into a silken narrative,” Robert Lewis, former editor-in-chief at Maclean’s, wrote in a eulogy. “He wrote about politics, business and the arts with aplomb.” ■