Media

This week’s magazines take a look at tech titans

We live in a tech world, and someday the gadgets will take over. In the meantime, the geeks have. For proof, just look at the profiles in the current business magazines.

Bloomberg Businessweek’s cover story on Jeff Bezos tells us more than we ever wanted to know about what a nasty person the CEO of Amazon is. Fascinating as the brutality details are, the article — which is an outtake from a new book on the e-commerce pioneer — buries the lead. Writer Brad Stone tracked down Bezos’ biological father, who did not even know the famous captain of industry was his son. Now that’s journalism. What Stone doesn’t do, unfortunately, is explain the link between Bezos’ lack of compassion and his parental loss.

One might expect Jony Ive — Apple’s design guru — to get more face time in Fast Company’s 10th annual innovation by design issue. After all, Editor Robert Safian anoints him “designer of the decade,” and his unshaven mug is featured on the mag’s cover. But the pub may disappoint those hoping to find a deeper dive into the brains behind the iPod and the man, in the post-Steve Jobs era, spearheading Apple’s design aesthetic. Elsewhere the mag reflects on major design turning points since 2004 but manages to miss Nintendo’s Wii in 2006 while proclaiming the Beats by Dr. Dre headphones a good thing.

The problem for most business mags is that with so much space to fill, it is hard to craft critical analyses for every page. Fortune’s Managing Editor Andy Serwer knows this all too well and his cover story, “Sheryl Sandberg: The Real Story,” proves that tackling big names and big issues doesn’t always pay off. A 2,500-word story on the Facebook COO breaks little ground and is filled with fawning adjectives. It is an insult to the neo-feminism it seeks to boost. Are we to be amazed she arrives at work with a cell phone glued to her ear or that, as the No. 2 exec at the No. 1 most-talked about tech launch, she is able to get senators and senior White House officials on the phone?

Forbes sure can toot its own horn, highlighting the 200 percent rise of its monthly readership compared to three years ago. But it’s a wonder the glossy business biweekly draws any eyeballs, given its relatively ho-hum coverage. Take for example, the feature by Jeff Bercovici on Twitter. The piece notes Twitter and TV broadcasters will be trying to leverage from each other to make money. #Noduh! Elsewhere, an item about the challenges facing new Carnival CEO Donald Arnold after the cruise line’s media disasters with Concordia and Triumph seems old and tired.

New York attempts an inside view into the workings of The Post, some of which we don’t recognize as particularly factual. The article did, however, get one thing right: “It is hard to imagine New York City without The Post’s scabrous running commentary.” In that spirit, we’ll comment that we’d like to imagine New York City without this magazine’s incurable obsession with real estate and home decor, whether it’s in New York City or someplace on the other side of the world. This week, we get 10 pages devoted to a Balinese treehouse.

The New Yorker’s profile of Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey maps out a rather striking résumé. We were impressed to learn, for example, that Dorsey did stints as a clothing designer and a baby-sitter, in that order. We also like the fact that he’s a failed massage therapist, and that a key inspiration for Twitter was Dorsey’s childhood fascination with a police scanner. “I definitely feel the most fundamental issue is economic equality,” Dorsey says. That issue, evidently, is one that is also fueling Dorsey’s ambition to become mayor of New York City. Funny, because when he asked Michael Bloomberg for advice on how to land the job, Bloomberg said, “Become a billionaire!”

Indeed, Time’s profile of Bloomberg seems to confirm that his self-worship is based largely on his billionaire status, and his worship of other billionaires who he says are busy saving the world. “If we didn’t have private philanthropy, you never would have had Impressionism,” Bloomberg declares, apparently forgetting that Vincent Van Gogh was living in abject poverty when he cranked out the masterpieces that the world’s billionaires are now busy stashing away.