The man who changed business journalism

Gretchen Morgenson of The New York Times notes in her weekend column that Warren Buffett called recently deceased Forbes editor Jim Michaels the best business editor he had ever seen, and she notes some of his best edits/comments about stories written for the magazine.

They included:

“If I can’t stay awake editing this, how can a reader stay awake reading it? What’s the point? If it has a point, maybe we can make a story of it.�

“I can’t make head nor tail of this. There’s a story buried in all this confusion, but I can’t find it. Fix it or kill it.�

“This is a remarkable job of interviewing an interesting and colorful man and getting precisely one quote.�

“Here’s another one I can’t understand without help from a lawyer and accountant.�

“This is more an essay as written than a Forbes article. It badly needs the concrete images, the real people that will anchor it to reality. It’s called shoe-leather reporting.�

Read more here.