More journalists and media commentators seem to be playing everyone’s favorite new game of Tearing Into Portfolio. This morning we mentioned Elizabeth Spiers’ piece on the second issue of the magazine—a brilliantly wicked, lengthy evisceration that recalls why we once wanted Elizabeth to edit a collection of nasty essays we proposed calling “The Poison Pen.” And Jon Friedman’s at it too, using his column at Market Beat to take aim at the magazine. And over happy hour drinks the other day, we heard lots of nattering negativity from the nabobs.
But as we pointed out this morning, it’s a bit early to pronounce the failure of an enterprise that hasn’t yet even settled into a regular publishing schedule. We’ve had two issues, published months apart. The Portfolio-ista’s haven’t yet flourished, perhaps, but it seems a bit early to expect them to have totally remade business journalism and fixed everything that’s been so wrong with it for so long. What’s worse, this is starting to look a bit like a pile on: everyone jumping the new kid on the block just because he comes from a rich family.
Gary Weiss, a veteran business reporter and one of the best guys doing investigative business journalism today, thinks the Portfolio bashing has gone too far, too fast.
Look, they’re probably right. The first issue underwhelmed me, and I’m not exactly running to the newsstand for the second one. But I am starting to wonder if the constant slamming on Portfolio isn’t going a bit overboard. After all, are the competitors all that much better?
There are only a dwindling number of periodicals left that engage in long-form narrative journalism. Even a flawed outlet for this vanishing species is better than nothing.
The magazine is only just beginning, for Pete’s sake. Portfolio may suck eggs in some respects, its office politics may be right out of the Kremlin circa 1938, but it is a new outlet in a contracting market. To answer my own question, it matters. Give the friggin’ magazine a chance. Lay off.
More after the jump.
We used to do some work for a private equity guy who refused to even glance at newspapers or business magazines. His thought was that people who read newspapers were to caught up in the present, and should probably start reading magazines. And he said that people reading magazines should given them up for books.
The earliest reviews of Conde-Nast’s Portfolio are coming in. We probably should be doing things like reading the actual magazine. And we’re planning on getting to that as soon as we get up the courage to lift its 300-plus pages from the place where we dropped it. (Bess Levin’s desk, with a note: “Summarize all relevant data—Thks-JC.”)
In order to make a splash with its inaugural issue, Portfolio*–Conde Nast’s bid to remake the world of business magazines (by getting women to buy them)—has resorted to the oldest trick in publishing: using Tom Wolfe’s daughter to get Tom Wolfe to write something. Alexandra Wolfe, who we recall worked at the Observer for a while and maybe the Wall Street Journal—we used to kind of stalk her but lost track at some point—is writing for the front of the magazine and Papa Wolfe has 2,500 words on hedge funds.
