Biz magazines providing perspective during economic turmoil

John Koblin of the New York Observer writes Wednesday about how the business magazines are able to compete against the business networks and daily newspapers in explaining what’s going on during economic turmoil.

Koblin writes, “Operating between the screaming financial pundits on the two-headed cable-financial-news dragon of CNBC and Fox Business Network, who have to correct themselves on the Dow mid-sentence all day long, and the cool daily dispatches coming out of The Times, the Financial Times and The Wall Street Journal, it would seem time for the business magazine to step up and tell us what’s actually going to happen.

“It’s probably a question whether the business magazines — which have for some time now only had to race for ‘gets’ among CEOs who would agree to sit for smug, arms-crossed portraits, to be printed next to ‘how’d he do that?’ Genius Profiles — have the metabolism to do that, especially on lead times stretching to weeks, in some cases.

“But can anybody tell us what’s going to happen?

“Two weeks after Lehman Brothers went under, a blown-up picture of Henry Paulson’s face, looking not so smug, was plastered across the cover of the biweekly Fortune with the cover line: ‘Paulson to the Rescue.’ On Oct. 23, an image of former AIG CEO Hank Greenberg in sunglasses took the cover, weeks after AIG went down.

“Fast work? Not so much. Mostly luck.”

Read more here.