The Fall of the House of Forbes

I just got done with Stewart Pinkerton’s The Fall of the House of Forbes. I found it definitely worth the 13 bucks, but that’s probably because I worked at the company for eight years.

So, would I recommend the book to people who haven’t worked for Forbes? If you are fascinated by the eccentricities of rich people, certainly. Pinkerton serves up plenty of detail on the oddball and lavish sides of the Forbes family.

As a broader look at the media biz, I wouldn’t rate this one so highly. Pinkerton lays heavy blame for Forbes’ troubles on the family’s alleged incompetence, without going too into depth on the larger forces at work. So it can be misleading. For example, he dwells on the recent rounds of layoffs at Forbes but doesn’t really explain that plenty of other media companies were contracting pretty hard and cutting people at the same time.

On the flip side, he suggests Forbes is about to be crushed by Bloomberg and its “2000 journalists.” That may be true, but Pinkerton doesn’t go into what enables Bloomberg to field such a humongous edit staff. Again, I think that’s misleading. It leaves you with the impression that Bloomberg is a winner simply because they invest more in journalism.

A couple of other things bothered me about the book, but I thought it was a decent read overall. At the very least, I salute Pinkerton for writing down a bunch of stuff that I probably would have forgotten about in 10 years time.