What Gretchen Morgenson learned at Forbes

Dave Beal of MinnPost.com interviewed New York Times business reporter and columnist Gretchen Morgenson about her career and about covering Wall Street improprieties.

Here is an excerpt:

MP: A few years later, you went to Forbes. What’s the biggest thing you learned from Jim Michaels, the longtime editor there?

GM: Jim Michaels was a very tough customer. He was a newspaperman. He had broken the story of Gandhi being assassinated in India. He taught me two important lessons. One was the reporting you had to do, in a company story, to make your argument about whether to buy or sell the company’s stock. That meant reading balance sheets and income statements, but also going out to do shoe-leather reporting. The second thing he taught me was to be direct and not waste a reader’s time. He often used the phrase, “pity the poor reader,” when he complained about something you had written that was too long-winded.

MP: One of his colleagues once joked that Michaels could sum up the Lord’s Prayer in six words and nobody would know the difference.

GP: He was brilliant. He was irascible. But what an education.

Read more here.