Glamour! Guts! Passion! This is a Business Magazine?

Times are tough for business magazines, especially Fortune, where efforts to broaden coverage to include personal finance and other nonbusiness topics seem not to have helped. An article from the NY Times reports;

[A]d pages for the first three months of this year were down for BusinessWeek (3 percent), Forbes (9 percent) and Fortune (13 percent), compared with the same period a year ago, according to Publishers Information Bureau. Circulation at the big three has been flat or falling for the last few years, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulation.

So what's Conde Nast doing? Launching a new business magazine. Described as the Vanity Fair of business books, Portfolio debuts today.

If you visit Portfolio's web site and have the time, read Tom Wolfe's essay on those strange new billionaires who are taking over Greenwich. Fun reading unless you happen to be a hedge fund manager. (Actually, freebooting, take-no-prisoner hedgers will probably love their portrait.)