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Was the decision, in hindsight, an incorrect one?

Well, it also had to do with how many ad pages you could run. This was a period in which business advertising was growing a lot faster than other advertising, and other advertising was also growing quite rapidly. The Fortune fortnightly formula really enabled them to run far more pages than they would have as a monthly. So that in strict economic terms, it was not a failure.

But do you think that it was never the same magazine editorially and in terms of its quality?

Oh no, it was not. But, it was a change. Now if you look at Fortune under our new managing editor, you find it again to be a completely different publication, because the new managing editor is really an expert at packaging. That sounds like a derogatory term if you're in the magazine editing business. But packaging is very important! The way you present, the way you lay out, the way you put together certain elements in sort of a rational, comprehensible form is very important. Marshall Loeb is just a great expert at packaging a magazine. He packages the cover and he packages the inside. He would probably say, “If I had to word edit or package, I would say packaging would be much more important.”

Anything else you want to add on Fortune?

Well, only that it really changed business journalism in