Already, Stewart Pinkerton, an old magazine hand who had overseen the integration of the magazine's newsroom with the Web team, is "retiring," though our sources believe he was actually forced out by Lavin, an ambitious Forbes.com editor who previously worked at the New York Times. Lavin's next target, according to a tipster, is Tom Post, an editor high on the print magazine's masthead, who's been "shut out of the decisionmaking process."

What journalistic accomplishment is Lavin best known for among the Forbesians? Trying to censor his son's high-school newspaper. In 2001, when Austin Lavin was being impeached as student government president at Walt Whitman High School in a Maryland suburb, Carl, then an editor in the Washington bureau of the New York Times, sent a letter to a school superintendent demanding that copies of a school newspaper detailing the trial be removed and that a school television-news segment about it not air. (Lavin told the Student Press Law Center that he merely raised privacy issues about the airing of the story.)

Austin Lavin now runs a startup, Myfirstpaycheck.com, which he has been busily promoting on Forbes.com.

Date: Fri, 27 Mar 2009 13:30:57 -0400
Subject: To all edit from Bill Baldwin

After nearly 20 years at Forbes, most recently as Managing Editor, Stewart Pinkerton has decided to retire next month after the completion of the edit staff merger, a process he's been deeply involved in for the past few months.

For a long time we have depended on Stew in many areas: getting the magazine out on time and under budget, recruiting new talent to the editorial staff and overseeing foreign licensee editions. In recent years he was also the bridge between magazine and online editorial staffs, smoothing the way for this year's integration.

Prior to Forbes, he spent 24 years at the Wall Street Journal, part of that as Deputy Managing Editor. There are a lot of great journalists who owe a first or an important stepping stone in their careers to a hiring decision by Stew. Among them: Mary Ellen Egan, Dan Hertzberg, Dennis Kneale, Laura Landro, Jane Mayer and Jim Stewart.

Stew has been an important colleague, and we are grateful that he'll continue his association with Forbes as a Contributing Editor. Please join me in thanking Stewart for his many contributions over the years. We wish him all the best in the years to come.

Bill Baldwin