For the last 15 years, the quickest, leanest and meanest of the bunch was Forbes. Fortune is last in circulation at 641,621, though, like Business Week, it has roughly another 100,000 circulation for its international edition.Īll this represents a decided shift in one of the last good street fights in American journalism. Forbes said.Īnd Fortune, which tried to rejuvenate itself eight years ago by shifting from a monthly to a bi-weekly, named a new top editor last May in what many observers consider an attempt to steady the course of what was once the most elegant clipper in the Time Inc. “But we’re still paddling,” Chairman Malcolm S. “They are doing the right things.”įorbes’ circulation of 727,235 has changed little for three years. A week ago, it announced that, in a relatively poor year for magazines, it is increasing the circulation that it will guarantee advertisers next year by 15,000 to 790,000. The changes have yet to make much of a dent in the circulation and advertising war, but Business Week is optimistic that it is on the move.
In the last three months, Business Week has run cover stories profiling Richard Rainwater, the little-known financial wizard (“the best kept secret in high finance”) behind the Bass family of Texas reporting that the outside corporate director “may become an endangered species,” and exposing practices at Allegheny International that within days toppled management at that company. After more than a decade of giving ground to the competition, Business Week has become “the hot book,” in publishing parlance. The episode says something about the derby being run these days by the three primary business magazines: Forbes, Business Week and Fortune. “It (the Milken story) was the best thing we had,” and it made points Business Week’s did not, said another Forbes editor privately. But this time Forbes decided to run its story-minus the Morgan angle-and it poked fun at Business Week in an editor’s letter for “grandly” comparing Milken and Morgan, never allowing that it once had the same idea. To make matters worse, Forbes has a policy of killing stories when beaten into print by a rival. “That,” said Zalaznick, “was very disheartening.” Then one Friday last July, rival Business Week showed up with Milken on the cover-and its story compared Milken to Morgan. “We thought we owned the Milken story,” Forbes Editor James W.
Two years earlier, Forbes had run perhaps the best story to date on Milken, the money man behind many of the most daring recent corporate mergers. Milken, a bond trader at the Drexel Burnham Lambert investment house, to legendary financier J. Forbes, had been working for months on a piece comparing Michael R. Managing Editor Sheldon Zalaznick admits there was “blood on the floor” at Forbes magazine’s Greenwich Village headquarters after the Mike Milken cover story.įorbes, the scrappy magazine owned by motorcycle riding, hot-air ballooning Malcolm S.
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