How blogging changed critique of a new magazine

TheDeal.com’s Yvette Kantrow writes that the critiques of new business magazine Conde Nast Portfolio have come more fast and acerbic due to today’s blogging, immediate culture.

She wrote, “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.”

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