John Higgins, 45, business editor at Broadcasting & Cable and mentor to several generations of younger media reporters, including this one, died on Monday evening in New Jersey of a heart attack.

“He was a reporter’s reporter,” Max Robins, editor of B&C, recalls of the often blusterous but eminently patient colleague on the media beat.

He was among the first people I met on the cable beat at Reuters. And if not for his 30-second lesson in cable television economics early on at my first annual cable trade show, I would not have lasted through the assignment.

Thereafter, Higgins occupied a unique slot at most press conferences, where his questions, often in the form of witty public lashings, amused the press pool as much as they reduced people with big titles to human scale – at least for the duration of the press conference.  ”If there was an elephant in the room, he’d say, ‘What the f*** is with the big elephant in the room.’” Robins says. “He was absolutely fearless.”

Higgins is survived by his wife, Deborah Marrone, an attorney with the Federal Trade Commission, according to B&C.

Speaking to B&C, Time Warner chief operating officer Jeff Bewkes said, “We will miss him. He got a lot of things right and was decent about what he covered, even the bad things.”

Broadcasting & Cable remembers Higgins here.

A eulogy by the publisher and editorial director of TelevisionWeek can be found here.