Conde Nast has a smart biz magazine already

Marketwatch columnist Jon Friedman writes that despite all of the attention given to Conde Nast’s new business magazine Portfolio, which is slated to debut in April, the magazine publisher already has the best biz glossy around in Wired.

Friedman wrote, “The cover shows a guy who looks like he could pass for the perpetually perplexed David Byrne of Talking Heads. The caption says: ‘What we don’t know about …the universe, sleep, the brain, language, weather, time’ and so on.

“It features the Daily Show’s John Hodgman, billed playfully as ‘Guest Smarty-Pants.’ In smaller type, Wired billboards such compelling-sounding features as ‘How Yahoo screwed up,’ ‘the Pentagon vs. the battlefield bacteria’ and ‘Playlist: 10 things we love now.’

“Granted, this isn’t the kind of enterprising stuff we routinely thumb through in Fortune, BusinessWeek or Forbes. The trademarks of those publications are company stories. That’s fine — though after a while, these tend to run together and it’s hard for me to remember where I read each article.

“Wired could be called the antibusiness business magazine, for all the right reasons.”

Read more here.