TOLLROADSnews one small legacy of Forbes magazine's Jim Michaels (1921-2007) ADDITIONS

Longtime Forbes editor Jim Michaels has died in New York at age 86. If you like TOLLROADSnews please pay tribute to the excellence of Michaels' editorial judgment. He didn't know it but he set in train the events that led your editor here to specialize in tollroads. Back in the spring of 1995 Michaels scrawled OK on a faxed proposal for an assignment to write a piece about new developments in tollroads - electronic tolling, express toll lanes and investor owned roads - for Forbes. That OK released several thousand dollars for expenses and writing fees plus the incentive for about six weeks work including visits to people at 91 Express Lanes, Dulles Greenway, IBTTA and others in the toll biz. It was the second of three Forbes assignments I got as a freelancer.

I was able to spin the tollroads research I did on Forbes account into a longer policy paper for the Cato Institute. It got picked up by AP and soon the Forbes/Cato combo had me on talk radio, doing a couple of lectures, invites to do opeds etc.

Decided I'd better make this my niche.

I only actually met Michaels once - for about half an hour in his cramped, dark, untidy little office in a modest Forbes office building at the lower end of Midtown Manhattan. Other communications were by fax and telephone.

He wasn't the kind of man you like. If he was capable of normal social graces I never saw them. When I entered he grunted and sort of pointed to a chair where I sat silently while he found copies of my proposal and sample articles that I'd earlier mailed him.

He made occasional markings on them. He was editing my published stuff.

His first real words were: "You could learn to write."

I chuckled at what I took to be a joking put-down.

But I was told afterwards that coming from Michaels this remark was high praise.

He asked me to explain the proposal, listened silently, then said: "Do it."

I wanted some detail as to deadline and expenses and he said: "Just send it to me when it's done" and "Go where you need to go, send us the bills."

And he handed me my stuff back. His edits were good.

He hated unnecessary words, either in conversation or print.

He had no time for the kind of longwinded prose of the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal with their superfluous misters and incs, their pedantic sourcing, their pretenses of objectivity, and their gestures of balance.

"You must have a viewpoint on it, or it's not worth writing," he told me.

The Forbes family write this about Michaels:

"Without exaggeration, Michaels was the foremost editor of our era.
When he took the helm of Forbes in 1961 – he had joined the company in 1954 – he brilliantly turned what was then a second-rate publication into not only the leader of the business category but also one of the best magazines both here and around the world.

"He virtually created modern business journalism. He saw Forbes as the drama critic of business. Under his stewardship, Forbes became the definitive source of who was doing well, and who wasn't, and why.

"While Forbes stories were full of statistics, Jim always made sure they focused on the people in charge. Business – which was once regarded as a dull area of dry statistics – became a fascinating stage of drama, triumphs and tragedies, thanks to Jim's editorial flair and leadership.

"Jim was a relentless foe of verbosity; as one former editor quipped, 'Jim could edit the Lord's Prayer down to six words, and nobody would miss anything.' "

Bloomberg News writes: "Michaels was both a relentless advocate of free markets and a dogged critic of financial scoundrels and politicians given to meddling in the markets and promoting regulatory excess. Those themes, packaged in compact and often-opinionated stories, resonated with business readers, leading to a sixfold increase in circulation while Michaels worked at Forbes. The magazine's current circulation is 925,000 (Michaels style edit there). It was 130,000 when Michaels joined the magazine in 1954."

A great editor.

TOLLROADSnews 2007-10-06

FOLLOWUP:

Hatchet job on Dick Carr

One reader points out that Forbes ran an unfair piece - a 'hatchet job' - on Dick Carr of Interwest and his proposals for 6230 not-for-profit (NFP) tollroads in the late 1990s. Agreed. The Forbes piece morphed from the discovery that one of Carr's water/sewer deals in Arizona had gone bad to suggesting he was a conman and that the 6320 model was moonshine and fraud. It overlooked the point that all business deals involve some risk and some will fail.

Carr was apparently pushed out of interwest after the Forbes piece though there was no evidence that he'd conned anyone, or that there was any fraud. But for political convenience Carr was replaced by Bob Farris, a former FHWA administrator who went on to successfully build the Greenville Southern Connector tollroad as a NFP. However it is failing financially as a toll operation and is now looking for investor concessionaire money.

Forbes was wrong to personalize the issue and make Carr a villain. But in retrospect they may have been correct that the all-debt, not-for-profit (NFP) model - very popular at the time - was systemically flawed. The other NFP tollroad project Pocahontas Parkway VA also failed, and no more have been attempted.

Providing the developer with full compensation on opening and placing no risk or reward on operations seems to skew NFP projects to overcapitalize and just hope for the best about operational viability.

So OK, Michaels' style ubersimplification can lead to unwarranted vilification of individuals where there is really a more difficult to explain institutional deficiency and not so much juicy villainy as banal error, misjudgment, or bad luck.

The Forbes model of journalism can be unfair and misleading, just like any other model.

Envy in journalism

Columnist Doug Giles reports that a TV talking head called Keith Olbermann employed by MSNBC, a cable news channel in New York has an obsession with Fox News' Bill O'Reilly. I know O'Reilly. He's an old tabloid journo, I recall from my days in journalism in New York around 1980 - energetic and well-intentioned but an awful screamer, even before he got a beer in his belly. Back in those days I think he was around the New York Post. I've since come across him on the TV with Fox, but quickly changed the channel. Reminds me too much of bar-room argument.

Olbermann is new to me, but according to Giles he's a younger guy who aspires to get on a par with O'Reilly as an opinionated TV talk celebrity. O'Reilly by now is watched by millions whereas Olbermann's MSNBC is a small struggling channel. (Microsoft have always backed losers outside their key competency.)

Olbermann has set himself up as a leftwing O'Reilly, and he yearns for O'Reilly's ratings. Nothing wrong with that, I suppose, if your ambition is to be a famous barroom style TV celeb.

But Giles relates that Olbermann on MSNBC is not so much barroom offensive as pathetic, almost demented. Instead of doing his own thing he devotes large parts of his program to ranting monologues against O'Reilly of the larger TV channel.

Monologues like Olbermann's lack even the charm of a drunken argument where there's at least the entertainment of mutual anger on display, repartee, interruptions, and the constant tension of possible punches being thrown.

Giles diagnoses the obsessive Olbermann MSNBC monologues as a serious case of envy and adds these insights:

"Where envy differs from admiration/emulation is that envy is 'sorrow at another’s good' (Thomas Aquinas). Someone who’s centered can watch another person, or a party, or a nation righteously prosper and not hate them for it.

"The petty, envious person sees someone else excel and is slapped in the face with the reality that he just got dogged. So, instead of sucking it up and working harder and smarter, the unwise, envious one allows his pride to fuel his wounded spirit. This sets the dejected perp down a path of disparagement of the prosperous that eventually morphs into the desire to destroy the person, party or nation that has just trumped him."

The destructive urge born of envy becomes self-destructive.

see http://www.townhall.com/columnists/DougGiles/2007/10/06/olbermann’s_obsession_with_o’reilly

TOLLROADSnews 2007-10-07