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Bam! Bam! Bamity, bam, bam bam! That's the sound of massed media missiles firing away at Portfolio, the new Condé Nast business magazine that after a nearly two-year gestation landed on desks last Monday with a 332-page, high-gloss thud.
Bam! "Expensive and vapid," wrote Michael Thomas in The New York Observer. Bam! Could be "the Paris Hilton of business magazines," proclaimed Elizabeth Spiers on Dealbreaker.com. Bam! "CEO porn," declared LA Weekly's Nikki Finke on her Deadline Hollywood blog. Hardly an auspicious beginning for a magazine that is supposed to redefine business journalism — albeit by featuring a piece on hedge funds (the longest in the magazine) from the oldest practitioner of New Journalism around, Tom Wolfe. Bamity bam!
Seriously, it couldn't have been much fun to be a Portfolio staffer last week, despite being feted at a downtown New York hotspot, where temporary tattoos with slogans like "Show Me the Money" were on offer and where kind words by Condé Nast chief S.I. Newhouse were reportedly read aloud. True, there was a cheery piece in The New York Times to coincide with the launch, but it was clearly put together with Portfolio's help, since it featured orchestrated interviews with Newhouse as well as editor Joanne Lipman and publisher David Carey. ("A big wet kiss," is what one staffer called it, according to the Observer's Media Mob blog.) But for the most part, the reviews — especially in the blogosphere — were not positive. It was a strange phenomenon, very much of its time. In the old days, say the '90s, a magazine would launch (Brill's Content, Tina Brown's Talk), and readers, advertisers, media mavens and hangers-on would read it, gossip about it, decide on the spin. Word would spread and mass opinion would form, but it would take awhile. And, with the exception of a few mediacentric news outlets, say, The New York Observer, it would be pretty difficult to find a bona fide review of the new magazine. Fast-forward to today, and that's all changed. By the time most of the media's chattering classes picked up copies of Portfolio and stirred some Equal into their lattes, they could log on to Web sites and read what others thought. Everyone from The New York Times' Dealbook to Gawker.com to Mediabistro.com's FishbowlNY to the Huffington Post's Eat The Press offered up Portfolio tidbits on Monday, then engaged in a frenzy of mutual linking. Others simply summarized. Dealbreaker.com provided a handy-dandy "Round-Up of First Reactors" to Portfolio, enabling it to join the conversation before actually reading the magazine. There were a few positive reviews. "We really think this plucky little magazine has a shot!" cheered Eat The Press. But most were lukewarm, at best, especially as the week wore on and commentators had a chance to actually read the tome — and, perhaps more importantly, absorb what everyone else was saying. Gawker was the first to produce a lengthy, almost page-by-page review, including its plentiful, lavish ads. "We don't really follow finance all that closely and we still feel like we knew everything in this piece," it noted about Portfolio's women-in-private-equity spread. Not to be outdone, Dealbreaker followed the next day with its own page-by-page tour, weighing in at an unbloggy 2,900 words and upping the criticism substantially — "it's painfully bad for a magazine that has poured $125 million and 18 months of work into development," Spiers proclaimed. By Wednesday — a mere 48 hours after birth — it felt as if a consensus was forming, culminating in Thomas' scathing, if sensibly argued, review in The Observer (linked to by a bevy of blogs, of course). "Perhaps I'm asking too much intellectually, but what troubles me most about Portfolio is how lightweight it is, despite its physical bulk," he noted, after calling it "glossy, superficial, stale and, above all, safe." Still, he argued, "it's not entirely fair to judge a magazine by its first issue; you've got to revisit the thing after four or five." We agree. No magazine, not even the sainted New Yorker, was ever born fully formed. True, Portfolio did create some of its own undertow with its abundance of hype and self-regard. But given the cargo load of ads weighing the pub down, it's not going to disappear anytime soon. Besides, when it reappears, the blogosphere's instapundits will get to do it all over again. Yvette Kantrow is executive editor of The Deal. Categories Deal Video
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