When the folks at Fortune announced last month that they would cut back to 18 issues from 25 next year, they also vowed to make big changes to the publication itself. "CEO-as-god" covers would be a thing of the past, they pledged, to be replaced by more conceptual images, more advice-driven pieces and long-form journalism. So it was particularly jarring to pick up the Nov. 23 issue of Fortune and be faced with not just an iconic portrait of Steve Jobs, but a banner cover-line declaring him "CEO of the Decade." Perhaps Fortune's new policy on hagiographic CEO covers doesn't take effect until 2010.

Still, the very concept of crowning a CEO of the Decade feels a little out of place at year-end 2009 -- a time when the notion of business journalism as long practiced by personality-driven glossies is being questioned. As The New York Times' media columnist, David Carr recently put it, "The businessman as Colossus is by now a nostalgic impulse" and few people want to read about "men that seem far less Olympian than they once did." Carr did make an exception for Google Inc., Twitter and Jobs' own Apple Inc. -- companies that consumers hold in high regard by virtue of their products -- but that doesn't make Fortune's ode to Jobs seem any less ho-hum. After all, at this point in Jobs' heavily chronicled career, is there anything that Fortune could tell us about him that we don't already know?

Indeed, Jobs has graced at least 85 magazine covers since 1981, according to Kuo Design, which has compiled the covers on its Web site (which I found via Mediate.com). These include such recent Fortune efforts as December 2008's "Apple: The Genius Behind Steve" and March 2008's "The Trouble with Steve Jobs." Then there are the books about Apple and Jobs -- 21 of them by Fortune's count -- to which the magazine devotes three pages in its CEO of the Decade issue before concluding it's nearly impossible to "capture Apple's elusive leader." Fortune tries anyway, stuffing the issue with no fewer than eight -- eight! -- features on Jobs. It's a lot of space, but on closer inspection, not a lot of content.

Sure, there's the main story that spells out Fortune's not unreasonable case for naming him CEO of the Decade, if you buy the fact that such an honor should even exist. "In the past 10 years alone he has radically and lucratively reordered three markets -- music, movies, and mobile telephones -- and his impact on his original industry, computing, has only grown," it coos. It also acknowledges Jobs' faults, including his "often unpleasant demeanor," Apple's backdating scandal and the secrecy about his health, even if it doesn't dwell on them. The rest of the package, however, consists mostly of highly designed, beautifully executed, magazine "furniture," with stylish illustrations of CEOs -- (Andy Grove, Larry Ellison), fun art (Pixar's "Ratatouille," "Monsters Inc.," etc.) and slick graphics (Apple's "ever-mutating DNA"). The one thing there's not much of, however, are -- how should we say this? -- words. Informative, this package is not.

For all the talk of redesigning business magazines (and the layoffs and staff changes that come with it) to make them more valuable and appealing to readers in our digital and economically-depressed age, it seems many pubs can't get away from producing what they perfected long ago, whether it's a cover featuring Jobs or an elaborate, yet ultimately useless, ranking, such as "The World's Most Powerful People," which can be found in the Nov. 30 issue of Forbes. Yawn. No wonder some quarters cheered when Bloomberg hired Josh Tyrangiel, a non-business journalist, as editor of its just-purchased BusinessWeek. Perhaps he'll do something different and new, they trilled.

Or perhaps not. Tyrangiel hails from Time Inc., which institutionalized much of the stylish -- but not always substantive -- furniture that magazines are stuffed with nowadays. Tyrangiel, for his part, wasted no time before pledging his allegiance to the oft-discussed but rarely practiced holy grail of business journalism -- long-form. "Magazines are read reclining, and that lends itself to longer, more in-depth stories," he was quoted as saying.

Well, OK. Besides Tyrangiel appearing to be paraphrasing more nuanced remarks made by John Micklethwait, the editor-in-chief of The Economist on "The Charlie Rose Show," it's a little hard to discern what he's talking about. The fact is, if you're reclining and reading much more than a page or two, you'll probably be asleep.

Yvette Kantrow is executive editor of The Deal.

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