On october 2, James Walker Michaels, the former editor of Forbes magazine, died. He was 86. With him, an era has come to a close.

Jim Michaels was, without question, the best editor of our time. In the four decades that he led Forbes, it held sway as the most influential and readable business magazine in the world.

In the field of business journalism, Forbes was the gold standard, and Michaels was the standard bearer. Forbes stories were provocative, relevant, lively, short, to-the-point, and told through the people who ran businesses. At the end of the pithy, three-column piece in Forbes, was the lesson of the story — just like a morality play, as Steve Forbes, the owner of the magazine, put it. Forbes reporters had to have an opinion on the subject they were writing about, and every opinion had to be reported out to perfection, so it could be defended in a court of law.

Overseeing these operatic observations on American and global business, was Jim Michaels, the Friend of the Reader and the Terror of the Newsroom.

I worked for Forbes magazine for five years, during those heady eighties and early nineties, when America ruled, and business ruled America. American business was starting to globalise, and Jim decided he needed some global expertise in-house. So he began hiring reporters with international affairs degrees. I fell into that category, and joined Forbes as a fact-checker — that lowest of the low on the reporting totem pole, but the place where, we were told, all great reporting careers began.

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