Has there ever been a time where there was more upheaval and change in the business magazine business than what has occurred in the past four to six months?
Just to provide the big picture of what’s been going on, we’ve seen the naming of a new magazine Conde Nast Portfolio that won’t publish its first issue until the spring of 2007, yet has hired a number of high-priced business journalists for its masthead and generated a lot of attention for the money being thrown into its launch. Making things more interestins is the fact that Conde Nast is a private company, so profits aren’t an issue — at least not in the beginning.
Speaking of private companies, Forbes has remained a private for nearly 90 years, yet earlier this year the company sold a big minority stake in the business to a venture capital firm that counts U2 lead singer Bono as one of its investors. Forbes said that it needed the money to continue expanding, and it has made a big push to expand the presence of its Internet web site.
Fortune, meanwhile, is part of a public company that has announced that it wants to sell some of its magazines, but not Fortune, so that it can concentrate on some of its higher-profit publications. Fortune has also been in the hiring mode, as evidenced by some recent hires, and it has successfully fended off Portfolio from poaching some of its stars — notably Bethany McLean.
Right now, the winners appear to be Fortune and Forbes. What are they doing that the others aren’t? My impression is that they have identified an audience that was virtually unaffected by the changes in the businessworld in the aftermath of the dot-com bubble collapse. BusinessWeek, after dominating magazine awards for much of the 1990s, seems to be looking for a new identity that it has yet to find, and readers have noticed.
I also wonder if BusinessWeek is being affected for being too bullish on the Internet and technology companies that were the darlings of the 1990s. Having said that, Fortune doesn’t seem to be affected for having named Enron one of the most admired companies for years.
It will be interesting to see which one of the existing players will be affected by Portfolio, or whether Portfolio expands the business magazine market to new readers.
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the "major upheaval" for these magazines comes directly from the Blog.
My hypothesis is that the more newsy a magazine is, the more it gets impacted by the blogosphere. BusinessWeek used to break news, now it's reminding us what we learned seven days ago. The story-focused ones (and the ones that skew to older demographics) are less immpacted.
Others that get hit: specialty pubs like Red Herring. I remember 10 years ago first getting my hands on that pub, and there was no venture capital/silicon valley info like it anywhere. Now it's a weekly that publishes ancient news.