Later this week BusinessWeek will unveil the results of its 18-month makeover. The magazine is axing its travel, fashion and other lifestyle coverage—except Robert Parker’s wine column—in favor of more business news. They are also re-arranging the magazine by eliminating the distinction between US and worldwide business sections and moving the opinion columns to the back.
In an unusual fit of fairness, we’ve decided to wait to render judgment on the “relaunch” until, you know, we’ve actually seen the new magazine. But they sound good as far as they go. We’ve never read BusinessWeek for travel or fashion, and never really understood what the point was. The only all in one magazine we’ve ever liked is the Spectator out of London. Everyone else we prefer when they stay in their niche.
“The move is a concession to reality: Businessweek has never made much headway in lifestyle coverage and the advertising that accompanies it; neither have its competitors Forbes and Fortune,” Silicon Alley Insider’s Peter Kaplan writes.
On the party crash front, Page Six reports that Martha Stewart, Henry Kissinger, Dylan Lauren and Maria Bartiromo will be getting down at a relaunch party the magazine is throwing at Guastavino’s tonight. DealBreaker’s invitation must have been lost in the mail.
BusinessWeek Magazine Gets a Makeover [Associated Press via Yahoo]
BusinessWeek’s Makeover: More News, Less Lifestyle [Silicon Alley Insider]
We Hear [Page Six]

Amit Chatwani, long time friend of DealBreaker and the man behind Leveraged Sell-Out, is profiled in Business Week. It’s such a fawning exercise that we wonder what dirt Chatwani has on the BW writer. It even describes the “origins” of LSO like he was some kind of effin superhero.

The nefarious persona began to take shape when Chatwani drafted a widely forwarded mock cover letter to Lehman Brothers Inc. (LEH ) during his senior year at Princeton in 2004. “I have been practicing staring at a computer monitor for extended hours,” he wrote. “I can currently sit motionless in front of a screen for 28 hours, and I am improving daily.”
The computer science grad moved to New York later that year, where he settled with 10 cub investment bankers in a Tribeca loft and marinated in their vernacular and rituals. He found himself invited to yearend bonus parties of P. Diddy-esque profligacy. Chatwani marveled at how conspicuously guys wore their firms’ id badges to get a leg up in a shallow mating game. And how quality Wall Street relationship time consisted of stealing away from the office once a week to share an hour of TiVo. One paranoid banker even put together an intricate spreadsheet that handicapped co-workers’ likely bonuses.
It all became fodder for what Chatwani calls his “consummate banker caricature.” The site’s first post told the tale of two gold-digging Jersey girls coming to Manhattan on a hell-bent mission for their dream bankers. “It got read way more than I had ever expected,” he says. Lately, he’s been poking fun at young bankers’ penchant for exorbitant bottle service at nightclubs.

The Borat of Wall Street [Business Week]

Interesting article in the November 13 issue BusinessWeek, wherein our minds are blown by one– and we’re just going to come out and say it– crazy idea:

In business, people tend to gravitate to golfers for some reason.

Championship Résumés: Hitting fairways, sinking putts, and bringing in business [Business Week]

Someone’s got an axe to grind over at BW.com and whoever he/she is has embraced the platitudes of “kill ‘em with kindness” and “once you’ve got them exactly where you want them, which is to say, drugged up on outlandish and unwarranted flattery, leak an email detailing your work. By the time they come to, the only acceptable course to take will be a witch hunt that would make even Winona Ryder quake in her boots.” Gawker, hot on the trail, informs:

BusinessWeek’s online division has launched an Orwellian campaign to catch an internal leaker…The personhunt has been launched to track down who leaked internal emails relating to speculation about the identity of a commenter (“Martin Smithers”) who habitually and suspiciously praises the mag to the heavens. We hear that a “forensic audit” of emails has been ordered to figure out whence the leak sprung, and all IMs will now be surveilled. An even stranger rumor has boss Kathy Rebello hiring some sort of prose expert to compare the writing of employees versus that of the leaker, thus snaring the perpetrator in some kind of Da Vinci Code literary trap.

BusinessWeek Will Get to the Bottom of This, You [Gawker]