When giants roamed the Earth: how the self-proclaimed Capitalist Tool was brought down by capitalism itself.

• Author: Malanowski, Jamie
• Position: The Fall of the House of Forbes: The Inside Story of the Collapse of a Media Empire - Book review

The Fall of the House of Forbes: The Inside Story of the Collapse of a Media Empire

by Stewart Pinkerton

St. Martin's Press, 320 pp.

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Young readers may not believe this, but not long ago, some of the world's most vital and creative work was appearing in magazines. As late as the 1970s, the bulk of newspapers were gray recitations of official news and garden club announcements, and network television news was basically a radio roundup with pictures. Magazines, though, were where the action was. It is not an accident that when Jann Wenner wanted to capture the tumult of the 1960s, and when Gloria Steinem wanted to propel the women's movement, and when William F. Buckley wanted a rallying point for conservatism, they founded a magazine. Magazines provided homes for voices and ideas and, in doing so, created communities. Seldom any longer do restless young intellects seek to create magazines. Instead they blog, or tweet, or create Web sites. These options offer tremendous savings on paper and print, and they certainly offer readers a chance to form communities. But they have yet to create very many distinctive voices that manage to escape their niche and impact the thinking of society at large. Whatever the new media have created, it is nothing to rival Norman Mailer on the march on the Pentagon, or Tom Wolfe on radical chic, or Hunter S. Thompson on Las Vegas, or George Lois's amazing depictions of Nixon and Ali and Warhol.

If this introduction seems excessively lamentatious, it's only in keeping with much of the tone of The Fall of the House of Forbes: The Inside Story of the Collapse of a Media Empire, the new book by Stewart Pinkerton, the former managing editor of Forbes. Which, as the title clearly promises, tells the story of how a magazine, once rich and purposeful, lost its way, and how it is struggling for a raison d'etre in the twentyfirst century.

Forbes was once a giant of a magazine, one that reached its apotheosis of influence and cachet in the 1980s. Under the leadership of Malcolm Forbes, the colorful, effervescent spendthrift who was the son of the publication's founder, the magazine--the self-proclaimed Capitalist Tool--became an exponent of the Market Ideology that bloomed during the '80s, and was accepted as a Bible by the men in the power ties and the women in the suits with padded shoulders whose worldview has governed us since. Pinkerton maintains that with his ballooning and motorcycling and...