Daly served as co-anchor on the 4 pm news broadcast alongside Linda Yu from January 1985 until his retirement in May 2005.

Following his retirement from news broadcasting in 2005, from March 2007 until October 2013, Daly served as spokesperson for Chicago's Cook County federal courthouse.

In 1968, about the time the station was renamed WLS-TV, Daly was paired with Fahey Flynn, and the two became the highest-rated evening news team in the city,[7] winning a local Emmy Award after just one year on the air.

Unlike most presenters of the time, who delivered the news in an austere, authoritative fashion, Daly and Flynn mixed in playful banter as they segued from one topic to another.

[12] Daly was inducted into the Chicago Journalism Hall of Fame in 2001[8] and received the first Illinois Broadcast Pioneer Award in 2008.

[14] In 1988, Joel Daly received a Juris Doctor from Chicago-Kent College of Law after four years of taking evening classes.

In 1994 he played Atticus Finch in a stage adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird,[17] and in 2000 he starred as Patsy McCall in a production of William J. Kennedy's Grand View.

[18] He played a news reporter in the controversial 2006 film Death of a President, which portrays the fictional assassination of George W. Bush.