Dealbreaker's Review of Portƒolio: Surly, Majestic, and Unspeakably Delightful

Sorry, the superlatives in the title above refers to the review penned by Dealbreaker Editor In Chief Elizabeth Spiers, and not Portƒolio, the new business magazine launched yesterday by dinosaur publisher Conde Nast.

Dealbreaker.com: Our Big, Fat Portfolio Review: Even Our Pessimism Was Optimistic
If the premiere issue is any indication, Conde Nast Portfolio** will be the Paris Hilton of business magazines: pretty but vapid, and unlikely to produce anything resembling an original thought.***
If you’re throwing darts at a newsstand, you’re probably as likely to hit something worse as something better. By all magazine standards, it's slightly above average.**** But it's painfully bad for a magazine that has poured $125 million and 18 months of work into development. (We're no strangers to painfully bad, you understand, but Dealbreaker costs less than a Deb Schoeneman contributing editor contract to produce and it's done entirely on the fly. What's their excuse?)

Never have I seen a review so packed with bon mots. It puts even the most savage of book reviews by Brit intelligentsia to shame. I thought about quoting some of the more select Dealbreakerisms, but there's too many. I would have to cut and paste the entire review and that much orange font on a black screen would be overwhelmingly Hallowe'eny.

If you are a lover of sarcasm, snark, and backhanded compliments, you owe it to yourself to read the entire thing. The snark train just keeps on rolling, and picking up speed, for all 2,925 words of it.

In summary, regular Dealbreaker commenter Zbignew put it best (as he is wont to do):


Best. Hatchet Job. Ever.

Ms. Spiers needs to post content more often.

Posted by: Zbignew April 17, 2007 05:11 PM

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