Red Herring Ferrets Out News
Written: May 21 '02
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Product Rating:
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Pros: A magazine that takes on biz icons...
Cons: ...with a limited audience and tech knowledge a must for readers.
The Bottom Line: Required reading for those even remotely impacted by tech and business issues. Oops, that would be everyone. Study hard.
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| Joubert's Full Review: Red Herring Magazine |
The editorial staff at Red Herring magazine wants you to know that they never intended to be Business Week for Geeks or any other “new economy” publication. Instead, the magazine that celebrated its tenth anniversary in April was founded years before the web had swept the wide world, focusing instead on science and technology related business issues. That meant covering the dot bomb from start to finish, but also means a lot of coverage of defense and biotech as well as a host of issues related to the web and other businesses.
General circulation magazines have a tougher editorial row to hoe than Red Herring and other niche titles. Most are forever treading a tone between addressing an expert audience and the rank of newcomers that will one day be experts. Some, like Fortune and Smart Money constantly veer towards explaining fundamentals before progressing through a story, making many of their articles longer than necessary by constantly refreshing their audience’s knowledge base. Red Herring makes no such concession. The reader either gets the article or moves on. This bicycle has no training wheels. Imagine, for example, if Popular Mechanics stopped midway through its articles to explain how to properly use a socket wrench. The Economist is a similar title in the business arena, albeit to a different, more global audience. Still, the editorial staff at The Economist would immediately delete any sidebar that attempted to explain deflation or supply and demand with McAnecdotes served with a side of McGraphs.
How Many Scoops Would You Like?
Not exactly. The magazine is still required reading in tech hotbeds, but those hotbeds include non-web world such as Maryland’s I-270 biotech corridor and Texas’ huge energy conglomerates. There’s an awful lot of attention paid to venture capital – far too much if you’re not active in a field being impacted by VC – but there’s a lot of strong editorial content too.
In April’s anniversary issue, boss editor Anthony Perkins (and just how cool a name is that?) claimed scoops over the Economist, Scientific American, Fortune and MIT’s Technology Review. The Fortune scoop, a behind-the-scenes look at The Carlyle Group, was fascinating. Were I not already receiving a complimentary copy of Fortune, I would have been tempted to dash off a note to circulation requesting that they stay within sight of the upstart Herring, maybe within the same quarter. Because I read a great article about Carlyle in Red Herring that I clearly remember discussing over the holidays. Yet here was Fortune publishing something so similar that I thought the magazine had become Reader’s Digest for Business. The articles weren’t identical, of course, but they were close enough to allow editor Perkins to crow in print that he had upended a giant once more.
Meanwhile, May’s cover story on nano-technology will no doubt be covered by more mainstream media outlets in the future, and June’s Red Herring 100 already has the potential to become yet another magazine’s rankings of The World As We See It. Competition is fierce in the latter category – everyone from Fortune and Forbes to Inc. and my local newspaper publish lists of some sort. But Herring’s list is especially well done; neatly clustering the 100 Companies That Will Shape The Future into industry segments. Sure, other publications arrange their content in different ways, but Red Herring’s minimalist design is well suited to the obligatory single paragraph summarizing a company of hundreds or thousands of employees.
Welcome To The Arena, Editors
Sun Microsystems is a huge company. Yes, I do say that about all organizations with a $22 billion market cap and $3 billion in quarterly revenues. More importantly, a company like Sun means a lot to a magazine like Red Herring, which despite its 350,000 paid subscribers and newsstand sales, needs advertising. June’s interview with Sun CEO Scott McNealy showed just how gutsy the Red Herring editorial staff can be when pushed. McNealy comes across as a pompous, condescending billionaire; which last I checked, was the consensus on him anyway. For Herring to show the man’s warts to the world took courage and made for a great read.
Meanwhile, the Letters section remains a free-for-all, not unlike a moderated bulletin board. Here, of course, the editors always have the final word so the put down is thorough and complete. Think of it as a little verbal sparring before the main match in that month’s featured articles.
As with other business magazines, there’s enough investment advice here to churn Warren Buffet broke. I’ve repeatedly said that folks who invest on the basis of magazine articles and other hype deserve their losses. But at least Herring has not been afraid in my experience to say that the emperor is naked. Perkins, in his anniversary editorial, continued the magazine’s crowing with the announcement that Red Herring called Enron into question in a September 1 issue – well before the mainstream press began shooting at the Texans. Indeed, one recurring column is called The Contrarian and the magazine on whole does appear to try to break the vanilla mode in which most other magazines operate.
Subscription Information
When I started outlining my thoughts for this post, I was on the fence about renewal, but I’ve talked myself into another year. My subscription still has a good 18 months to go, but I’ll be returning a response card when they start appearing in my mailbox mid-cycle. New subscribers, meanwhile, can purchase this monthly direct from the publisher at $34.95 per year or at $29.95 using one of the discount links appearing below.
© 2002 Joubert
Recommended:
Yes
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