Portfolio among media winners in 2007

Rachel Sklar of Huffington Post picks new business magazine Conde Nast Portfolio as one of the winners in the media world in 2007.

Sklar wrote, “Could it be? Is it possible that beleaguered and piled-upon Portfolio could be a….winner? After all the hoopla (read: money) leading up to its launch, expectations were high and criticism cutting, but somehow it’s still around — and so is EIC Joanne Lipman (even if some of her senior editors/contributors aren’t).

“Somehow it picked up 350,000 subscribers and seems to be a magazine with good writing (and good writers) plus a purpose: business as the intersection of everything else (in the most recent issue there are stories that touch on Will Ferrell’s online comedy site, Gossip Girl, the Drudge Report, the faux-populism of John Edwards, rock-star-cum-financier Bono’s financier-cum-rock-star partner, corporate espionage, and Wall Street family foundations (the one weak link was an essay by Robert Reich against corporate responsibility, which was simplistic and superficial).

“Also, it’s got a surprisingly vibrant web presence, with independent bloggers generating online buzz and pickup (see Lloyd Grove and Jeff Bercovici). All told, the upshot is: It’s 2008, and Portfolio is still around. Not a high bar necessarily but an important one to meet for something that may just represent the last of the great magazine launches. How it fares will cast a long shadow.”

Read more here. Another one of her winners is Rupert Murdoch.