Spiers 2, Portfolio 0

Elizabeth Spiers takes a look at the second issue of Portfolio, and she’s not impressed (via DealBreaker):

The second issue of Condé Nast’s big-budget business mag, Portfolio, arrived on newsstands last week and I plucked one from atop an enormous stack of them at the Union Square Barnes & Noble in New York. Between the weeks of media coverage citing long weekends, staff disagreements, reports of fewer ad pages in the second issue and more recently, the public firing of deputy editor Jim Impoco, the magazine has created enough internal melodrama to stoke curiosity–mine, anyway–about how well the second effort stacks up to the first. The temptation to speculate about the skyscraper stack of Portfolios being indicative of oversupply (the money and resources the company is pouring into the publication) or lack of demand (the target audience isn’t interested in reading it) lingers, but one retail outlet isn’t a legitimate sample size.
And neither is one reader. But if Portfolio were a high-end business magazine, I’d be an enthusiastic subscriber. The problem is that it’s not. Press coverage has referred to it as a “Vanity Fair for business.” It’s not that, either.
The unfortunate thing is that it could be both. Portfolio should be a magazine about power, specifically in the private sector: who has it, how they got it, what they do with it, and whether they’re using it for good or evil. (If you’re going to write about Cerberus, for example, I have less interest in how secretive Steve Feinberg claims the firm is than what sort of deals John Snow is cutting in China, with whom, and to what extent the Chinese government is involved–something that has wider-ranging implications than the notion that some hedge-fund managers play against stereotypes and drive pickup trucks.) The magazine should exploit the biggest major advantage that print has over the web and that monthlies can generally do better than weeklies–long-form narrative journalism. There are huge swaths of the private sector that aren’t materially covered right now. These are stories that existing mass-market business publications mostly bypass: They tend to cover large public companies; which are most relevant to the average investor. But that’s a very narrow view of the business world. It’s fine for The Wall Street Journal, which purposefully and usefully focuses on investors, but limiting for a general-interest business magazine.
That Portfolio hasn’t taken advantage of its opportunity is probably a reflection of editor-in-chief Joanne Lipman’s background, which most famously consists of launching The Wall Street Journal’s “Weekend Journal,” a lifestyle-oriented section that had little to do with covering hard business stories. And Portfolio’s flaws seem to be rooted in its editor’s entrenched habits from doing a very different sort of journalism.

Posted by on August 23rd, 2007 at 2:58 pm


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