PETER BRUCE: My first week as FM editor was a baptism of fire

I walked into the editor’s office at the FM on a Monday in January 1997 and was stunned by its luxury. The walls were lined with bound copies of the magazine, lovingly packed on wraparound oak bookshelves behind the editor’s vast desk and hideously comfortable reclining leather desk chair.

There was a fridge with wine in it. A fourth-floor balcony with a fine view over Joburg’s northern and western suburbs. A big conference table. I’ve never felt as excited as I did when I sat in that chair.

It is a strange thing to walk into a room for the first time and to be in charge of it. You know none of the people in it. They are wary of you and you of them. What to say? What to do?

My secretary, Dee Beguinot, saved my life. "Conference starts in five minutes," she said, just before a group of strangers walked into my office and sat down at the table and proceeded to tell me what would be in the magazine in three days’ time. It sort of stayed like that. I was a youngster. They were grown-ups.

My editorship started under strained circumstances. I had been back in SA for a year, editing Business Report for Tony O’Reilly. Then, in December 1996, FM columnist David Gleason, with the help of the late mining magnate Brett Kebble, bought control of Finance Week. Nigel Bruce (no relation), then editor of the magazine, announced that he was moving with Gleason and would edit Finance Week. I was offered Bruce’s job.

I had two challenges in the first week. That Monday I tried my best to help the magazine’s veteran deputy editor, Michael Coulson, accept my presence in his space. He was grudging at first but the next day we were quickly united in crisis.

Tuesday was a big production day. Page proofs starting piling up in my in-tray. I had to read them and sign them off and put them in the out-tray. Round about 1pm Coulson came into my office with bad news. The bulk of the subeditors — the people who fundamentally make the magazine by editing copy, writing headlines and captions and other "furniture" — had been called by Bruce and Gleason and been offered substantial pay increases if they left the FM immediately.

I could not believe it. We had about six subs. Some got up and left there and then and I never really even met them. But I learnt a great lesson — nothing stops a publication appearing. Everyone piled in to help.

But over the next few days other colleagues crossed the floor. The managing editor left, senior writers. I thought the world was coming to an end. And it was only after a long time that I realised both Gleason and Bruce, who while they were on the FM had probably taken the subs for granted, understood that their first edition of Finance Week might not appear unless they did what they did.

I slowly became more confident. I begun to feel the potential of the FM. A weekly publication is the most challenging of all. You have to stay current but you have to commit to a cover, to stories, long before they will see the light of day. Sunday newspaper editors must be under huge pressure come late Friday and Saturday. A daily rides the news cycle. There’s always something.

Over at Finance Week the old Nigel Bruce FM was being simply copied. The FM’s Fox pages of company commentary became, in Finance Week, Badger. Their jokes on the back page got better. I remember panicking, but the competition acted as a binding agent as I and the colleagues who hadn’t left got to know each other.

We reinvented the FM. Writers got bylines. New columns appeared. We redesigned it (to the horror of some older readers). Within two years Finance Week had all but collapsed and the FM had touched its record high circulation (of close to 35,000 print copies sold in the first half of, I think, 1998).

I loved the FM. The writing was often exceptional. So was the art direction and layout. Its editorial meetings were gladiatorial. People, I remember thinking, were so nasty to each other as they criticised what their colleagues had written when they got copies of the magazine on a Wednesday. But it enriched the journalism and the FM has been lucky in its editors since I left — Caroline Southey, Barney Mthombothi, Tim Cohen and now Rob Rose have taken great care of it and poured their lives into it.

I didn’t leave the FM by choice and still have the letter the shareholders wrote instructing me to apply for the Business Day editorship at the end of 2000. I had declined to apply. I loved Business Day but, given the choice, I would have stuck with the FM.

• Bruce was FM editor from 1997 to 2000