Wizard of Forbes

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.

I would have gladly started as a janitor at Forbes. For me, the biggest thrill of being at Forbes was not the magazine so much as the chance of being in the aura of the legendary Jim Michaels. I think I’d heard of him from the moment I was born — and every Indian should have. Michaels was posted to India as a reporter with United Press in the 1940s, the years when a new nation was taking birth — and Jim recorded the pangs and the ecstasy. But he made history when his became the first account of Mahatma Gandhi’s assassination that the world would read — a story that beat rival Associated Press by 15 minutes. Michaels saw a devastated country weeping over Gandhi’s body at Birla House; the world saw what Michaels saw. He said, later, that his time in India had changed his life and his view of the world. (How karmic, that Michaels should die on Mahatma Gandhi’s birth anniversary.)

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