Former Wall Street Journal reporter and WSJ.com managing editor Rich Jaroslovsky writes about Fred Taylor, the former Journal managing editor and executive editor who died Monday.
Jaroslovsky writes, “Fred Taylor was the Managing Editor when I first joined the Journal as a summer intern in 1974. My last feature that summer was a piece for Page One on how some correspondence schools—the precursors of today’s for-profit education sector—were ripping off their students. (Sound familiar?) The story didn’t run until months after I had returned to school with no idea whether I would ever work for the Journal again.
“One day, I received a letter from the Journal. It seemed that the CEO of Macmillan, a very large publisher that also owned a correspondence school, took vigorous exception to my story, accusing me of a multitude of journalistic sins. The Journal wanted to hear my side before responding.
“Anguished, I sat down and produced an exhaustive, three-page, single-spaced, point-by-point refutation, and sent it off. A couple weeks later, I received a thin envelope. In it was a copy of Fred’s response to the CEO. It ran about three sentences.
“It didn’t quite include the words ‘screw you AND the horse you rode in on,’ but it might as well have. Dripping with sarcasm, it informed the CEO that not only was the Journal standing firmly behind its 20-year-old former intern—to whom it owed absolutely nothing—but the CEO should be ashamed to have complained in the first place, and even more ashamed of his own business practices.
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