• by Larry Dobrow , Featured Columnist, August 11, 2005

When Red Herring spit the bit following the puncture of the tech bubble, I chalked it up to kismet. Astonishingly, given the ebb-and-flow nature of the publishing and technology worlds, the mag had developed one whopper of an ego. During a function somewhere around 1999, one of its editor types bragged to me that Red Herring was only considering folks from The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times for staff and freelance gigs. He wore an ill-tailored black suit over a neon-yellow shirt. He didn't appear to be drunk.

Hence I derived particular enjoyment from Red Herring's swift, inevitable descent into irrelevance. Which leads me to the question: Can a business publication that's been stripped of its influence and utility ever entirely recover? After looking over the August 15 issue of Red Herring mach II (or is it mach III? I lost track), I'll answer with a shaky, tentative "yes."

The mag may be less expansive and entertaining that it was during its boom-years prime, but it's also more focused and less prone to PR-fueled hyperbole. As opposed to the dawdling approach of years past, every single item now lasers in on the particular technological aspect that, at least in theory, should render it pertinent to tech-leaning business folks. This is a dopey thing to say about a non-human entity, but Red Herring seems to be trying a lot harder than it used to.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the vast, comprehensive cover feature on the world's dwindling water supply. While the mag suggests that water could soon become "the new oil," the feature never veers into hysterics or alarmist banter. It surveys desalination and other potentially promising technologies and outlines the water shortfalls faced by Israel, Africa, the United States and others. Plus the writing is smart and elegant, with one of the most grabbing business-story leads I've read in some time: "If all the world's water were poured into a liter-sized bottle of Evian, the quantity humans could drink would fill half a teaspoon."

The water feature and its sidebars/charts/illustrations occupy roughly 35 percent of the August 15 issue; the other 65 percent is much more of a hit-or-miss affair. The good: Overstock's Patrick Byrne alleges some kind of super-duper-secret Wall Street banker conspiracy in a breezy Q&A. The bad: its merrily condescending section title notwithstanding ("Better Than You"), the piece on Travelocity CEO Michelle Peluso amounts to lovey-dovey feature writing at its most flaccid. Outside of the cover story, Red Herring shoots slightly under 50 percent the rest of the way - which is fine if you're the New York Knicks, but disappointing if you're a publication trying to regain must-read cachet.

Given its updated frequency, I wonder about the timeliness of much of the issue's content. The story on News Corp.'s purchase of MySpace.com's parent company broke weeks ago; any well-after-the-fact analysis has to be a hell of a lot more incisive than what Red Herring presents here. Similarly, speculation about the course charted by new Hewlett-Packard CEO Mark Hurd should have found its way into the magazine when he assumed the role in April.

And then there are a handful of choices that don't make a whole lot of sense. An item on the possibility that Apple will offer phone services is accompanied by a photo of a shirtless dude (Tarzan?) and a knife-wielding chimp, with the caption "Apple: the Cheetah of the phone business?" One of "Fish Tales" end-o'-the-book blurbs (on something involving a blog, an Xbox 360, and the son of Microsoft's regulatory compliance manager... I think) tries so hard to be glib that it makes no sense whatsoever. We're also treated to both a publisher's note and an editor's note. What, didn't the assistant art director have anything to add?

In that publisher's note, Alan Vieux writes about how journalism has become more cutthroat than ever before, soberly noting that "magazines must morph and provide a different competitive advantage to their readers." Really? You think? Either way, give Red Herring props for endeavoring with all its might to provide this advantage, even if it only occasionally distinguishes itself from the competition.