Have you read Condé Nast’s Portfolio yet? Edition one came out late April. Bold, ambitious, smart and entertaining. Just when you began to wonder how another magazine could capture you, there it is. The successful ones do it by creating familiar personalities. In earlier times, readers were fed the things magazine editors felt they ought to know. Not anymore. Now it’s the readers who are in control and the new editor has to attract them by carefully layering stories and pictures that have intimate appeal. I’m talking about turning a page and getting that buzz of delight when seeing an article on the very idea you were thinking about that morning. The magazine business is no longer in the information trade, it has become an empathy business. Portfolio gets this in a big way. For a start, it takes business writing into a completely new space, beautifully combining emotion and intellect. The first edition includes a fantastic mood piece on Hedge Fund managers by Tom Wolfe (that might sound dull; it’s not) and great articles on Bill Ford, women in private equity, and the race for blood stock supremacy between the Irishman John Magnier of Coolmore and the Maktoum family that rules Dubai. The publisher of Portfolio is David Carey, the man who made The New Yorker hip again, and Joanne Lipman is Editor-in-Chief. This is the first innovation in business writing since Alan Webber and Fast Company, and is the perfect answer to another dreary delayed domestic US flight. In-depth analysis, great storytelling, quirky opinions and tongue-in-cheek provocation with serious analysis and contemporary art direction – what can I say? Subscribe now!
