A nice piece on Michaels by Allan Sloan. "Working for Jim was more than occasionally maddening, but he was the greatest editor I've ever seen or ever expect to see."
After the jump, a column I wrote about him when he retired nine years ago. Funny, but my mental image of Jim at this moment is not as a genius or a tyrant but as a guest at the long-ago wedding of two junior staffers; we are still married, and we are both sad tonight.
Farewell to the toughest boss in journalism
by Edward Cone
News & Record
10-22-98
There are bosses who scare people, and there are bosses who scare people into doing their best work. Jim Michaels, the long-time editor of Forbes magazine who recently announced that he will step down at the end of this year, is one of the latter.
Michaels is the behind-the-scenes genius who in more than three decades as editor helped transform Forbes from a reasonably successful business magazine into the profitable and popular media brand of today. The late Malcolm Forbes built the image and sold the ads, but Michaels gave Forbes its scrappy tone and rigorous standards.
Michaels edited with an investor's eye, and he could be brutally blunt when he saw something he didn't like. ''Where are the customers' yachts?'' was a line he liked to use in stories about self-dealing or overpaid executives. ''Trees don't grow to the sky'' was a maxim he applied to speculative frenzies that couldn't be sustained.
As hard as he has been on ill-managed companies, penny-stock hustlers and bureaucrats, Michaels might have been scarier still to his own staff. His scathing comments on work he considered to be subpar were so legendary that Forbes built an ad campaign around them earlier this year, running excerpts from his notes as proof of the magazine's toughness.
Here's one he wrote about an article of mine when I worked for him several years ago: ''(the) story is silly and surfacey, utterly un-Forbes as stands. Without requested info it wouldn't go in the Podunk Gazette.''
My officemate once got a complimentary note from him for ''a remarkable job of interviewing an interesting and colorful man and getting precisely one quote.''
Some writing was ''too cutesy-poo.'' One poor guy, who went on to a very successful Forbes career, got bashed with this: ''Is this supposed to be a parody? Journalism of the absurd.''
The messages - many harsher than the ones cited - went to any writer who offended Michaels' sensibilities, from lowly researchers to award-winning senior editors. And his notes were visible to anyone in the building who cared to log onto the computer system and read them.
You'd come to work in the morning, pleased to have turned in what you thought to be a decent enough article, and find your co-workers rubbernecking at the smoking ruins of your story. Even now, as an occasional freelance contributor, I sweat until my work is through Michaels and at the copy desk.
Beyond the potential for public humiliation, there has long existed at Forbes the very real fear of getting fired. Michaels is reputed to have axed one staffer on Christmas Eve, although he recently told the New York Times that he couldn't remember the exact date. People had a tendency to walk into his corner office and come out unemployed.
I remember sitting in my editor's office one afternoon with several other reporters, waiting for a story meeting to start. Finally the editor, a key Michaels lieutenant who is now a well-known Wall Street columnist, showed up to his own meeting. ''I've just had an existential moment with Jim Michaels,'' he said. ''I no longer work for this magazine.''
Michaels paid his staff back for the rigors he imposed on them by involving them in the production of a first-class product. You learned by watching him get to the essence of a story, which is a lot harder than it sounds. He improved copy by simplifying it, breaking down complex deals into clear language and eliminating jargon. The Forbes style of prose is not beautiful, but it gets the job done thoroughly and in as few words as possible.
The Forbes of Jim Michaels wasn't a place for everyone, and the world of business journalism is well-populated by Forbes alums who got their training and got out. Most of them, though, would tell you that they never had a better editor than Jim Michaels.
© News & Record 1998
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