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.
“Worse than the news. By the time it’s in a magazine, it’s old news,” he’d say. “There’s nothing useful to be learned from them.”
But that isn’t true.
A trio of finance professors have demonstrated that at business magazines are good at indicating the end of a period of abnormal performance. Basically, if a magazine is writing about it, it’s already old news. And that is useful to know.
The study focused on the covers of BusinessWeek, Fortune and Forbes. But they’re old news themselves. We decided to apply the measurement to Portfolio. Glancing at the cover at Portfolio one sees that the magazine cover has, well, nothing. No words except it’s title, subtitle, title, date, and website. And it has a picture of Manhattan rooftops.
So is the message that nothing is over? The Portfolio is over? The Conde Nast is done? New York City is through? “Business Intelligence” is no longer businesslike or intelligent?
Then we remembered that we torn off a cover-flap. It’s stuck between the pages of an biography of Hilaire Beloc that we’ve been reading. Maybe that’s where the secrets to what is already over are hiding.
After the jump, the cover-flap stories and our analysis.
Sometimes the Stock Does Better Than the Investor That Buys the Stock [New York Times]
Portfolio
Other than looking a little confused when holding up the premiere premier first issue, Jon Stewart’s interview with Matt Cooper about his Valerie Plame piece in Portfolio aired Monday without any discussion of the mag. This, despite Cooper’s insistence that he was entirely focused on promoting Portfolio. Here’s a quote from Cooper in the Portfolio blog:
I still haven’t seen the show. I’ve been on the road promoting Portfolio in Atlanta and now on to Minneapolis and haven’t had Comedy Central in my hotel rooms. But I’ll be curious what it looked like.
The interview was good. Jon is tough on the press as everyone who watches the show knows so I found myself defending a profession that I think he rightly critiques most nights but kept trying to bring it back to the mag because, hey, that’s what I was there to promote.
By “bring it back to the mag” Cooper meant not talking about the mag at all. Papa Nast cannot be happy – it’s one chance to develop some street-cred with the “younger than Tom Wolfe” generation was squandered.
Does it sadden anyone that the Daily Show is reaching for guests in the depths of Portfolio? I don’t know whether that speaks more to Daily Show guest bookings or Portfolio’s insta-“prestige.” At least it’s a bit amusing that Portfolio needs to be referred to as “Conde Nast” Portfolio just to seem legit. You need to pump at least $125mm into your magazine launch for branding.
Daily Show Interview with Matt Cooper
Behind the Scenes at Daily Show – [Portfolio]
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Business Glossies
Conde Nast’s Portfolio Takes A Pounding From Post, Observer
By John CarneyIf there were champagne corks popping around the office of Conde Nast’s Portfolio on Monday, there might be some wound licking this morning. Yesterday the New York Post declared the magazine “empty.” This morning the New York Observer’s Michael Thomas finds himself disappointed with the magazine. (And, of course, you can read Elizabeth Spiers’ devastating take on the magazine here.)
The New York Observer’s take sums up the view of those who are short the magazine:
Nowhere in the 335 pages of this first issue is the merest remnant of what we used to call history and the fascinating—and even occasionally instructive—parallels between past and present. It’s as if our present world sprang whole from the brow of Mammon. Perhaps I’m asking too much intellectually, but what troubles me most about Portfolio is how lightweight it is, despite its physical bulk. This is supposed to be a magazine about business, about making money and losing it, about getting and spending, about honor and thievery. About character and the clues it strews. (There’s a great piece waiting for someone on Steve Schwarzman’s syntax.) And speaking of the Blackstone supremo, how come Jimmy Lee, for a decade the Spirit of Christmas Present to Schwarzman’s Scrooge, isn’t a lead underwriter in the Blackstone I.P.O.? What a nice piece that would make.
But at least they got to have a nice party!
An Empty Portfolio [New York Post]
Massive Portfolio’s Platinum-Plated Debut [New York Observer]
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.”)
But fortunately lots of other people are reading Portfolio so we don’t have to. Here’s a quick round-up of the early reactions.
Portfolio arrives to a somewhat testy Going Private, who thinks the magazine gets it wrong even before the first page. Even the cover is wrong, the acid penned mistress of the private equity world says. What’s wrong with the cover? According to Going Private it depicts “a bunch of hideous downtown rooftops bathed in the caustic acid of sodium lights on a business magazine cover that doesn’t even have a feature article on the financial performance of local roofing contractors or sodium light distributors.”
DealBook comes in with two items today on Portfolio. The first notes that the magazine wants to bring some glamour to world of business magazines.” And by glamour you get feeling that what they really mean is “women.” Indeed, as we noted a long, long time ago, Portfolio is aiming at being something of a business magazine for women. Most business magazines have readerships heavily tilted toward the male. Portfolio predicts that it will have a much more balanced readership. And apparently it hopes to achieve this by re-imagining corporate board rooms as a sort of red carpet or awards show where “business executives treated like celebrities,” according to DealBook.
After the jump we give Portfolio‘s readers the full treatment.
- Use the Bloomberg command
NH BLG_DEALBREAKER <GO>
to access Dealbreaker
