Appreciating the career of Jim Michaels

Forbes has a nice review Wednesday evening of the career of former editor Jim Michaels and what made him a special business journalist.

The non-bylined story stated, “After a stint at The Buffalo News, Michaels joined what was then a pure investment magazine. He wrote about mutual funds. Seeing a future in what was then an obscure corner of Wall Street, he flattered fund vendors by paying attention to them, but shocked them by scorecarding their performance.

“He played the same role as his turf expanded to corporations generally. Forbes, he declared, would be the drama critic of American business. And it wouldn’t use mincing words. If a chief executive was a nincompoop, the Forbes story would say so, provided the facts were there to prove the point.

“If Michaels’ Forbes was no booster of business, it was a believer in free-market capitalism. Such a stance is not rare today, but for most of Michaels’ tenure as editor, it was quite at odds with the prejudices of mainstream journalists.”

Read more here.