It was always going to be a sensation. Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour had become a global, billion-dollar phenomenon long before it touched down in Toronto last November for six shows over 10 nights.

Still, Swift’s inescapable Toronto takeover was remarkable to behold: 500,000 visitors descended on the city. Streets were renamed in Swift’s honour. An enormous friendship bracelet encircled the Rogers Centre stadium. Fans spent more than C$150 million on restaurants, hotels, and Uber. The mayor tweeted that she couldn’t score a ticket.

Preparing for a new Era

Within the maelstrom, our newsroom was prepared. We’d prepped for Eras for what felt like aeons, with every editorial team involved: news, entertainment, business, plus the video and photography groups.

I was the editor overseeing the coverage, with Mark Colley, a 23-year-old journalist drafted from the news division, acting as our dedicated Swift reporter.

Colley, a fan of Van Morrison and Rush, started his prep by listening to Swift’s discography on his morning runs. (“Blank Space” was an early favourite.) He brushed up on Swift’s cultural impact, her controversies, her successes, and, of course, her fans, to understand her significance when she brought her magic to Toronto.

As November approached, about 15 of us met weekly to talk ideas, which we captured in an overflowing Google sheet and in an emoji-laden Slack channel.

When the concerts started, we had a daily planning meeting to discuss logistics and assign reporters: Who was going to the stadium to talk to the Swifties? Who would take photos of fans on the subway en route to the concert? Who was going to try the “Meet Me at Midnights” lavender cocktail?

Focus on the fans

Our primary goal for daily coverage was to record and analyse Swift’s impact on the city. How did the Eras impact hotel prices, transit, and traffic?

The answers to those questions sparked dozens of articles, photo essays, and podcast episodes. Our primary goal for the magazine,  Taylor Swift in Toronto, was to capture the excitement of Eras in all its forms and show how it transformed Toronto and its citizens, even for just two weeks.

As Colley and our art director, Becky Guthrie, were putting together the magazine, our most important takeaway was that Swift herself, the musical genius, was the fixed point, but it was her fans — the Swifties from around the world who came to worship her — whose energy lingered after the last of the glitter wore off.

It was their emotion and passion that kept us all going. Colley spoke with many Swifties, including Daphné Carisse and her 12-year-old daughter, Emma. She said that because she uses a walker and feels pain when she sits for too long, she doesn’t get to do very much with her children. In November, she snagged two accessible tickets to Eras and had “the most amazing night” she’s ever had. Instead of watching the concert, Carisse said, she watched her daughter.

Then there was Katherine Finlayson, the winner of our Toronto’s Top Swiftie contest. A law student, Finlayson has loved Swift since she was 11. (The phone call I made to her to tell her she’d won was one of my highlights of 2024.) She came to our office portrait studio wearing heart-shaped sunglasses and dozens of friendship bracelets, including several in Toronto Star blue, which she gifted to me and Colley. Several weeks later, Finlayson and Colley visited our beauty pop-up to get glitter freckles applied; they also went to see Eras together.

“It felt like I was revisiting every version of myself over the past 17 years,” Finlayson said.

The past few years have been challenging for Toronto. People are frustrated with transit, traffic, and the difficulty of buying a home or affording skyrocketing rent. The problems are real and can’t be solved with a concert or six.

Still, I’ll never forget the feeling of being in the city for Night One of Eras, the excitement, the gleam, the goodwill that made Toronto and its people a better, happier place to be.

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