Very nice comments about fellow journalists and right on target. Portfolio and now VF have some of the most insightful and in-depth articles on business around. Occasionally Rolling Stone as well which is surprising. On the other hand, Fortune, NY Times, WaPo, and the news weeklies are sadly not even in the mix.

Only one issue with the post. In your litany of writers above, you’ve left of Alan Deutschman, who’s covered Silicon Valley since the early 1990s. Like Lewis, he’s not afraid to provide critical analysis on business titans.

However, I don’t agree with your contention that Portfolio primed VF to be a leader in financial journalism, especially by hanging your argument on Lewis’s new piece–which doesn’t seem wholly different and special to VF, with these quotes particularly jarring:

“What’s especially noteworthy about Lewis’s article is that F.P.’s money managers spoke to him; stunningly, they claimed no one else in the media had come knocking.”

“Considering the mess newspapers find themselves in, the remarkable thing about Lewis’s take is that it ran at all.”

Beyond style and his inimitable storytelling skills, how does Lewis’s piece on AIG-FP differ from the Washington Post three-part series that ran in December 2008? The reporters spent thousands of words walking through the origins of AIG-FP, profiling the key players, and exploring its decisions and legacy, all with heavy background:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/12/30/AR2008123003431.html

Similarly, a Lewis-penned VF piece on the Iceland crash roughly corresponded to the New Yorker’s own story, which shared anecdotes and offered similar conclusions.

The conventional argument – that financial news is of the moment, ergo it behooves leading glossies and papers to cover it with long-form stories – may be less rewarding to Portfolio alumni, but isn’t it more accurate?