IndustryWeek innovator Stanley Modic
receives Lifetime Achievement Award
Editor noted for visionary
thinking, explorations of international
manufacturing methods.
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| Stanley J. Modic |
Stanley
J. Modic, who helped transform IndustryWeek magazine
into one of America’s top
business-to-business journals in the 1970s,
was chosen to receive ASBPE’s
Lifetime Achievement Award at its national
conference in Chicago July 20.
Stan Modic has been with Nelson
Publishing Co.’s Tooling & Production magazine for
the past 16 of his 46 years in journalism, and now serves
as senior editorial advisor and a columnist. He retired as
vice president of Nelson’s five-magazine
Manufacturing Group in 2002. Before coming to Tooling & Production, he
had been with Huebcore Publishing’s Purchasing
World when Huebcore became Adams Business Media. Adams
was sold to Nelson in January 2002.
Previous honors for Modic have included the Cleveland
Press Club Hall of Fame Award in 2002, and the Association
of Business Publishers’ (now American Business Media’s) G.D.
Crain Award. For his latest honor,
staffers at Tooling & Production, in Solon,
Ohio, quietly made the nomination of Modic so that he would
be surprised if he were selected. And indeed, Modic had no
clue that he was in the running for ASBPE’s highest
honor when national president Roy Harris called him with
the news.
The Classic Winner
Said Harris, “It is a thrill to be able to surprise
someone with this honor — especially a modest editor
who has no idea that staffers have made secret plans to put
his name forward. Stan Modic is the classic Lifetime Achievement
winner, someone who brings innovation after innovation to
our profession, and yet who never thinks of it as a personal
accomplishment, until someone like ASBPE takes note.”’
In an article that celebrated Modic’s selection to
the Cleveland Journalism Hall, it was noted that in assembling
leading thinkers within IndustryWeek’s
pages — thinkers like Drucker, Alvin Toffler and Daniel
Yankelovich — Modic was able to set the publication apart
as something special in industry. IW also lined up a string
of international correspondents “to give our readers
a better fix on what was going on around the world,” Modic
said.
He made IW one of the first U.S. publications to send an
editor to China, just after President Nixon re-established
Sino-American relations. Then in 1974, with the nation still
deep in the Cold War, Modic accompanied his Washington bureaus
chief to Moscow to cover the first U.S. machine-tool exhibition
in the U.S.S.R. Meeting with the Soviet Minister of Information,
Modic had a personal mission. “The Russians had been
using material from IndustryWeek without paying any royalties,” said
Modic. His mission was successful. At the end of his meeting,
the Russian minister was ready to pay Penton its royalties.
“It wasn’t much,” Modic noted, “but
we got a few rubles out of them.”
Hallmark Achievement
His hallmark achievement at IW was considered the series
of executive study missions he launched in Japan to unearth
secrets of that nation’s manufacturing success in the ‘70s.
Said the writer of his Cleveland Hall tribute, “The
study missions gave IW’s executive readers entrance
to Japanese companies and manufacturing facilities that they
couldn’t have arranged on their own.”
Dedicated as well to the networking of business-to-business
journalists with other journalists, he helped lead the reactivation
of the Cleveland Press Club in 1977. He also served as president
of the Cleveland chapter of Sigma Delta Chi, now called the
Society of Professional
Journalists.
According to his nomination letter from the Tooling
& Production staff: “The manufacturing industry
still marvels at Stan’s journalism magnum opus — the
April 2000 issue, Metalworking in the New Millennium, a one-of-a
kind issue that featured such luminaries as futurist
William L. Duncan and management
author Peter F. Drucker. As Stan
pointed out in his
lead editorial, ‘Some of what you
will read inside this issue is couched in fiction today.
It will be fact tomorrow.’ He was right.”
He first left the newspaper business to become an assistant
editor of Penton Publishing
Co.’s Steel magazine in
1965. He was named executive editor in 1969, and was among
the leaders in turning Steel into IndustryWeek in 1970.
Modic becomes the seventh business journalist to be honored
for Lifetime Achievement by ASBPE. Last year’s winner
was Don
Ranly, professor emeritus at the University of Missouri’s
School of Journalism. Previous winners were Patrick
J. McGovern,
founder and chairman of giant publisher International Data
Group; Dana
Chase Jr., chairman of Dana Chase Publications
and editorial director of Appliance magazine; editorial
consultant
Howard
Rauch; Vernon
Henry of Advanstar Communications, and
Bernie
Knill of Penton Media.
Download
ASBPE’s press release
about this year’s Lifetime Achievement Award winner. (35KB Word doc)
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