Economics
Deadlines and Disruption
From 1984 to 2005, Shepard was the editor-in-chief of Businessweek, with a front-row seat for everything from insider-trading scandals to the rise of personal computing and the Internet. In this excerpt from his forthcoming memoir, Deadlines and Disruption, he recalls what it was like to step into the job—and how he was determined to reinvent everything about business journalism
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(Excerpted from Deadlines and Disruption by Stephen B. Shepard Published by McGraw-Hill © 2012)
When I succeeded Lew Young as editor-in-chief in the fall of 1984, I had no idea that business journalism was at the dawn of a golden age. The Dow Jones average was around 1,200—less than one-tenth of its current value. The just-introduced Apple Macintosh computer was little more than a novelty. And Chinese leaders still wore Mao suits.