Loomis and Buffett at the 'Tap Dancing to Work' party (Donald Bowers/Getty Images)

“I haven’t read it yet,” admitted Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein at Monday’s book party at The Lambs Club for Carol Loomis’s Tap Dancing to Work, a collection of Warren Buffett’s wit and wisdom as published in Fortune over the years. (Mr. Blankfein strode briskly away when the Transom asked his thoughts on the upcoming “fiscal cliff.”) “I’m looking forward to reading it,” allowed Washington Post honcho Lally Weymouth. JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon left even before the toast, during which Time Inc. editor in chief John Huey lightly roasted Mr. Blankfein. “I think it’s always good to have someone around willing to write a check to save ...” Mr. Huey began.

“Never mind, I’ve already left!” Mr. Blankfein shouted from the crowd.

But Tap Dancing to Work—which will take Ms. Loomis (a Fortune writer since 1954) on a tour of The Daily Show, Charlie Rose, and Today—is sure to find an audience among those seeking the wisdom of “The Oracle of Omaha,” or an extremely WASPy Christmas present.

“I think it’s mainly for serious investors, and young people will give it to their fathers, wives will give it to their husbands, and some people will buy it for themselves,” Ms. Loomis said.

Ms. Loomis is both friend and fan. The pair’s meeting back in 1967 was auspicious. “He was an unknown,” she explained. “What I saw was that he was just about the smartest man I’d ever met—and I know a lot of smart men.” She notes in the book’s preface that she wouldn’t have found it appropriate to have written a biography of Mr. Buffett, given the pair’s long-standing relationship. (She is an investor in Berkshire Hathaway and writes the company’s letter to stockholders, while covering Mr. Buffett for Fortune.) She told the Transom that she had never invested in a way that would contradict Mr. Buffett’s teachings. “I really never have. Once I had the opportunity to learn from him, I have never not followed his advice.” The two play bridge together as well. Asked who has the upper hand, Mr. Buffett told the Transom: “We’re about the same.”

Ms. Loomis later admitted, in a brief speech to a crowd that included CNBC’s Becky Quick, The New York Times’s Andrew Ross Sorkin and Reuters’s Felix Salmon, that she’d misspelled “Buffett” in print in an early article. “I thought she was so infallible, I’d spell it whatever way she wanted,” Mr. Buffett quipped.

"In this newly-created position reporting to me, Jed will be responsible for all ad sales and marketing for TIME, TIME.com, FORTUNE, FORTUNE.com, Money and CNNMoney.com, allowing him to harness the collective power of these tremendous brands to provide smart, creative and scalable solutions for our advertising partners across every print and digital platform," Todd Larsen, Time Inc.'s executive vice president and group president, wrote in a staff memo.

Full staff memo below:

October 10, 2012

To:       News and Business Group Colleagues

From:   Todd Larsen

Re:       Group Publisher

Still not kidding.

Former General Electric CEO Jack Welch emailed editors at Reuters and Fortune today to let them know that he won't be contributing columns to either publication going forward.

While Mr. Welch's email, published at Fortune, merely notes that he and wife Suzy, with whom Mr. Welch pens his columns, get better "traction" at The Wall Street Journal, Fortune senior editor Stephen Gandel notes that Neutron Jack's resignation follows reporting by the two organizations on a certain somebody's jobs report tweet on Friday.In case you missed that one, Mr. Welch surmised that last month's jobs report—which stated the lowest unemployment rate since January 2009—had been fixed to aid President Barack Obama's re-election campaign. Yesterday, Fortune managing editor Andy Serwer went on MSNBC and criticized Mr. Welch's sentiment. Reuters, meanwhile, referred to allegations that during Mr. Welch's tenure at the helm of GE, the firm used well-timed transactions to ensure it hit Wall Street's earning estimates.

For his part, Mr. Welch didn't back down from his tweet. Per Reuters:

"These numbers just don't go with the economic activity," Mr. Welch said. "You draw your own conclusions."

And:

He says he went through reviews of more than a dozen companies in different industries this week and none were stronger in the third quarter than they were in the second. "You can't just call me old and senile," he said.

And we won't.

Well, that strategy, as strange and short-sighted as it was, is now officially scrapped! Joe Pompeo has a fascinating piece today on Fortune's attempts to reinvent its website, which is being led by Daniel Roth, who used to work at Portfolio (another business website that let go nearly its entire editorial team immediately after Lehman Brothers went down, which was six months before the entire Portfolio print and web operation shutdown).

Pompeo writes, "Roth has since launched two new blogs and brought the total number of web editorial staffers to 10. The site has gone from producing one original daily item to between 12 and 15."

Their big hire came in the form of Dan Primack, a Reuters blogger, yesterday. Obviously, Fortune.com is coming back to the game awfully late, but they've got the brand name, and maybe they can at least make up some of the ground they've lost over the last few years. But can they compete with the likes of DealBook and another online business franchises? That's an uphill climb.

Mr. Wiley was at Time Inc. for nearly 25 years, most recently leading the business side at Fortune.

At BBW Mr. Wiley replaces Jessica Sibley, who left earlier this week to take over as publisher of The Week.

Ms. Sibley came to BBW in 2008 and remained with the magazine during the acquisition by Bloomberg LP.

At the The Week, Ms. Sibley joins a team that pioneered the use of reader recall rate guarantees to sell ads. This strategy made The Week one of only a handful of titles to grow ad sales in recent years. Larger companies like Time Inc. have also begun similarly guaranteeing returns.

Former publisher Jed Hartman left the The Week in March to become the group publisher for Time Inc.'s Fortune and CNNMoney.

In the March 16 issue of Fortune magazine, which will hit newsstands on March 9, the magazine is issuing an apology to its readers for plagiarizing a New York Times Magazine article from 2004.

“In our Feb. 2 issue we published a story about Lukoil and its president titled “Russia’s King of Crude,”” the apology will read, a copy of which was obtained by The Observer. “We have since discovered that several passages were lifted from “The Triumph of the Quiet Tycoon,” written by Peter Maass and published in the New York Times Sunday Magazine on Aug. 1, 2004. Fortune apologizes to Mr. Maass and the New York Times Sunday Magazine.”

When the author of the Fortune story, a young, rising star at the magazine named Barney Gimbel, was presented with the two stories and the lifted passages during an internal investigation, he offered his resignation.

He sent out an email to staffers Feb. 19 announcing that the next day would be his last.

“Hello all, I just wanted to let you know that Friday is my last day at Fortune,” he wrote in an e-mail  “I have enjoyed working with all of you over the past few years and I will look forward to keeping in touch.”

When we asked a Fortune spokesperson about his departure, she said: “We do not comment on personnel issues.”

Gerry Marzorati, the editor of The New York Times Magazine, said that a few weeks ago the author of the plagiarized story, Peter Maass, contacted Fortune editors about several passages that looked nearly identical to his own. Fortune editors contacted Mr. Marzorati immediately and said they were looking into it.

There is in fact some uncomfortably familiar wording in the latter of the two pieces. Here is a sampling:

TIMES MAGAZINE:

Alekperov's titanium-and-glass desk is fastidiously neat -- he hates disorder -- and behind it hangs a frieze of the double-headed eagle, which is Russia's coat of arms. If a visitor doesn't yet grasp his message, there is just one photograph on his desk, a black-and-white portrait that shows not his wife or teenage son but President Putin. If, in your mind's eye, you replace the eagle with a hammer and sickle, and if you imagine a photo of Leonid Brezhnev on the desk, you could be back in the U.S.S.R.

FORTUNE:

Behind his glass desk is the double-headed eagle, which is Russia's coat of arms, and photos of Medvedev and Putin. Replace the eagle with a hammer and sickle and substitute a photograph of Nikita Khrushchev, and you could be back in the USSR.  

TIMES MAGAZINE:

He did well in high school and graduated from the Azerbaijan Institute of Oil and Petrochemistry, after which he worked on the Oil Rocks, a fabled offshore field in the Caspian Sea. The facilities were Dickensian. He lived on primitive rigs prone to explosions, fires, storms and other disasters. On one occasion, a blowout on his rig threw him into the storm-tossed Caspian, and he had to swim for his life.

FORTUNE:

He graduated from the Azerbaijan Institute of Oil and Petrochemistry and soon went to work on the Oily Rocks, a storied offshore city on the coast of the Caspian Sea. The conditions there were famously treacherous. Once, during a storm, a blowout on his drilling rig sent him flying into the high seas, and he had to swim for his life.

TIMES MAGAZINE:

The lore that now surrounds him includes the story that when repair workers were afraid of approaching a pipe that had ruptured -- a spark could ignite a fireball -- Alekperov went to the pipe, sat on it and told the workers to get to work. If the pipe exploded, the Soviet roughnecks would at least have the satisfaction of knowing that their boss would pay the price, too.

FORTUNE:

Years later he was supervising an oilfield in remote western Siberia when a fuel pipe ruptured. His repairmen refused to go near it, fearing an explosion, and legend has it that Alekperov walked up to the pipe, sat on it, and told the men to get to work.

TIMES MAGAZINE:

And who owned Lukoil? The answer was simple: nobody and everybody. Like other enterprises carved out of the Soviet industrial base, Lukoil became the property of the Russian government. In 1993, the government converted it into a stock company and vouchers were distributed to Lukoil's employees, among others.

FORTUNE:

At first Lukoil remained the property of the state. But in 1993 it was "privatized," and ownership vouchers were distributed to Lukoil employees, among others.

“As far as I’m concerned, things were resolved amicably and fairly,” said Mr. Marzorati. “They did the right thing. They alerted us, they said they were going to do an internal investigation, and they didn’t stonewall in anyway. They acted courteously and professionally the entire process.”

The question is now what happens to Mr. Gimbel.

According to a Fortune staffer, during the investigation they found no other examples of plagiarism in his work.

His résumé was impressive. He was the recipient of the “'NewsBios 30 Under 30' award, which showcases up-and-coming business reporters" and "worked at Newsweek, where he wrote more than 50 stories,” according to his biography on the Fortune web site.

In 2001, Mr. Gimbel was awarded a second place Society of Professional Journalists 'Mark of Excellence Award' for Spot News Reporting for a Palm Beach Post story "Inner tube ride turns tragic for 2 siblings," which he wrote while still an undergraduate at Emory University. In 2000, according to The Emory Report, he was named "Reporter of the Year" by the National Scholastic Press Association and the Associated Collegiate Press.

Mr. Gimbel did not respond to emails or phone calls seeking comment.

In last week's story, one former Fortune staffer described fortune.com by saying: “It’s nothing now. There won’t be any more fortune.com original content in the near future.”

The folks at Fortune have objected to that statement. Their spokeswoman, Ali Zelenko, has sent in the following response:

Fortune staffers have been encouraged to write more for the Web site. Richard Siklos, a Fortune editor at large, told us that when he started at the magazine last year he volunteered to write a column for the site once a week.

Nonetheless, it is true that Fortune writers—because of their membership in the Time Inc. Guild—are not required to write for the Web, either. As Time Inc. editorial chief John Huey wrote in a memo to Fortune staffers two months ago, "Although we certainly hope that everyone will see the dot com platform as a vibrant and exciting enhancement to the readers’ experience, we want to be clear that Guild-covered employees are not required to contribute to the Web sites as part of their jobs,” he wrote, “and will not suffer any negative impact as a result of not contributing.”

So the question might be, how much material will Fortune editors be able to rely upon from its print staff? Plenty, seems to be Ms. Zelenko's answer.

He wanted to say thank you! Not only did the magazine have a series of timely covers—Hank Paulson was on one, and they had a profile of AIG’s former chief Hank Greenberg coming down the pike—but it was responding fast on the Web, and its Web coverage was impressing everyone in the building.

“I have to tell you, fortune.com is working out brilliantly,” said Mr. Serwer, according to one former staffer.

After his opening remarks, he singled out individual Web writers for all their breaking news. For those exclusive enterprise stories on the Web. Those ticktocks, and those trenchant second-day stories.

The speech, staffers said, made the horse and cart of the print and the Web seem to chase each other around the maypole. Which is dominant? At any rate, the Web did matter.

Well, less than two months later, the Web team at Fortune has been all but disbanded. With Time Inc. under the gun to lay off 600 staffers, each magazine has had the burden of deciding who’s disposable.

Fortune decided the bulk of its editorial cuts would come from the Internet: There were roughly a half-dozen layoffs at the Web site, and now it’s left back in the hands of the good people at CNN Money, the parent Web site that fortune.com used to be folded into.

“It’s nothing now,” said one recently laid-off staffer. “There won’t be any more fortune.com original content in the near future.”

By all accounts, Mr. Serwer’s comments at that meeting were thoroughly genuine when made. But with cuts going down all over the industry, it appears a portion of the magazine world, which was never a quick adapter to the Web anyway, is responding by shoving their Web people right off the boat first. “You’re never going to get the traffic that really matters,” said one publisher at Condé Nast. “So it’s a traffic thing, but also, how do you monetize the traffic that you have? It’s impossible.”

The operating policy now, particularly at Condé Nast, basically reads: Revenue first! Future later.

And the printed page, the luxury object, is still where you find the money these days.

“The print reader’s worth a whole lot more [than the online reader],” said publisher Jann Wenner in an interview with Advertising Age last week.

“It’s never come up before,” said one senior editorial staffer who works at the Wenner Media empire. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone in my position or higher talk about the Web.”

And where it was talked about, it’s quickly being forgotten!

Portfolio, a magazine that had one of the boldest Web sites in the Condé Nast empire, let that experiment go two months ago when it dismissed 25 of the 30 people who worked full time and as freelancers for the magazine’s Web site.

And why? Partially to save the magazine.

The magazine lost close to $20 million this year, and with the magazine’s Web site losses also totaling in the millions, Condé Nast group president David Carey, along with Condé Nast editorial director Tom Wallace, played a large part in convincing Condé Nast chairman Si Newhouse and CEO Chuck Townsend to keep the magazine afloat at a reduced publishing schedule. But to essentially gut the Web site.

Across Condé Nast, publishers are making a calculation about the revenue of the present versus the promises of the future.

“We work in the high-end market,” said our Condé Nast source. “We’re going to stick to it and we might be the last one standing, but that’s our philosophy. The Web isn’t really a priority.”

And Condé Nast editors certainly remain focused on the printed product.

On Dec. 4, all-star editors Graydon Carter, David Remnick and Anna Wintour talked about why magazines would be just fine.

“I think we’ve been in difficult times before and we’ve come out of them and I’m sure that we will again,” said Ms. Wintour.

“If your magazine—or your company, whatever it is—has a point, it can do well in tough times,” said Mr. Carter.

The New York Times’ Joe Nocera burst out of his seat during a question-and-answer session and strongly disagreed with the editors and wondered how they could be so sanguine about the future of print.

“Joe, no!” said Mr. Remnick. “A, we’re not sanguine. Or blithe. We think about it all the time. There are meetings about it all the time. We’re each thinking about this. Constantly.”

And truth be told, Mr. Remnick is doing something about it!

In recent months, according to staffers, he’s finally taken to the Web and has been encouraging his endless stable of writers (and editors!) to start contributing to it. Mr. Remnick also hired Avi Zenilman, a former staffer at Web-savvy Politico, to start badgering writers into coming up with more ideas to write Web-only content.

On Dec. 16, George Packer wrote a takedown of Sean Penn’s cover story for The Nation on Hugo Chavez and Raul Castro. Mr. Packer’s post was bloggy in every way—dripping with sarcasm (“veteran foreign correspondent Sean Penn,” or, describing Christopher Hitchens as the “world-famous hedge-fund executive and philanthropist”), snarky and a pretty frank and vicious attack. And it even got a link on Romenesko—not exactly a familiar place for New Yorker stories.

Moving print and Web closer together—something that started happening at newspapers three years ago—is the direction some magazines appear to be taking.

At New York, the magazine’s online arm of the Intelligencer section, the Daily Intel, will start producing more material for the magazine’s section starting next year. The section is expected to be undergoing a remodeling where more and more Web-only content will be reconfigured or re-purposed for the magazine. Jesse Oxfeld, a senior editor who worked on the magazine’s Intelligencer section, was laid off due to the Web and magazine integration.

At Entertainment Weekly, there were five layoffs, including two editors, with the idea that there will be less editing—and more DIY from its writers!—but also more contributions from the magazine’s writers.

And at Forbes there have been massive layoffs from the Web side—including Forbes Auto and Forbes Traveler, as Gawker reported last month—with a full integration of the print and Web coming in the new year.

Meanwhile, looking back, it seems a surprise that the Web Staffs of the Magazine World ever felt their oats in the hidebound ink-and-paper industry.

In late September, around the time Fortune’s Andy Serwer gave the speech praising his Web staff, John Huey, Time Inc.’s editor in chief, sent out a memo to the staff of Fortune writers. Rumors were swirling that if Fortune writers didn’t start contributing to the Web, they could suffer penalties, like a docked paycheck.

“Although we certainly hope that everyone will see the dot com platform as a vibrant and exciting enhancement to the readers’ experience, we want to be clear that Guild-covered employees are not required to contribute to the Web sites as part of their jobs,” he wrote, “and will not suffer any negative impact as a result of not contributing.”

jkoblin@observer.com

Readers of the November issue of Portfolio, Condé Nast’s lavishly produced business monthly, might well ask the question of their magazine’s cover star this month.

Of course, there wasn’t much time between the dark day when Lehman Brothers went all Cloverfield on American finance and the printer’s deadline for the magazine’s November issue.

But at Portfolio, as at most business magazines, it seems, the mood is less newsroom frenzy than quiet contemplation. And meetings.

“We’ve had more meetings,” said the magazine’s editor, Joanne Lipman. “And one of the things we did is we made a list of every writer we had and what stories they’re working on, and asked how their pieces are relevant, and has the landscape changed in a way to reshape their stories.”

The world that they’re covering is convulsing and you’d imagine that all hell is breaking loose on the 17th floor at 4 Times Square, but …

“It is a benefit to be a monthly,” Ms. Lipman said. “It’s been a major benefit—what we’re always trying to do is look ahead and we’re always thinking thematically, and that’s why we’ve been able to be ahead on the crisis. We’re not caught up in yesterday’s headlines and we’re thinking about what the impact is going forward.”

Operating between the screaming financial pundits on the two-headed cable-financial-news dragon of CNBC and Fox Business Network, who have to correct themselves on the Dow mid-sentence all day long, and the cool daily dispatches coming out of The Times, the Financial Times and The Wall Street Journal, it would seem time for the business magazine to step up and tell us what’s actually going to happen.

It’s probably a question whether the business magazines—which have for some time now only had to race for “gets” among CEOs who would agree to sit for smug, arms-crossed portraits, to be printed next to “how’d he do that?” Genius Profiles—have the metabolism to do that, especially on lead times stretching to weeks, in some cases.

But can anybody tell us what’s going to happen?

Two weeks after Lehman Brothers went under, a blown-up picture of Henry Paulson’s face, looking not so smug, was plastered across the cover of the biweekly Fortune with the cover line: “Paulson to the Rescue.” On Oct. 23, an image of former AIG CEO Hank Greenberg in sunglasses took the cover, weeks after AIG went down.

Fast work? Not so much. Mostly luck.

“We had those sticks in the fire already, which was great,” said Andy Serwer, the managing editor of Fortune. “That was something in the works for a while and it fell into place perfectly.”

Their most recent cover, on GE, was another feature story that was on their sked for months, and was reshaped just so that it could be used in the crisis as well.

Because, after all, weren’t all of the events that have happened since Sept. 15 somewhat … predictable?

Inside that Dov Charney issue of Portfolio, three stories in fact focused directly on the crisis. Two were columnist entries; but a third, on JPMorgan, had been assigned long before Lehman Brothers fell.

“We’re in a weird situation as a monthly—how much do you devote to this? And to this story?” said a Portfolio source. “People have other things on their mind, too, you know. It’s a question of balance.”

“There’s not a sense of urgency,” said another Portfolio staffer. “There’s no rip-up-the-magazine, all-hands-on-deck atmosphere.”

And what would it serve them, after all? Can the magazine commit to a broad analysis so soon into the crisis, when not everyone even agrees whether we’ve hit bottom yet?

Maybe in the next issue! Michael Lewis, the current superstar Portfolio contributor, is preparing a piece to run in the magazine’s December issue on Wall Street. The piece was assigned months ago as well, but now there’s time to make it really stand up and work for the magazine. Because once it’s finished, one of the country’s most important long-form financial journalists is packing his bags and moving upstairs to Vanity Fair.

At Fortune, Mr. Serwer said that he’s kept a news slot open in the magazine.

“It is the business world’s 9/11,” he said. “Nine-eleven was such a big story that there was nothing else going on. The first issue we didn’t write about anything else, in the next issue 95 percent about 9/11, and in the next issue 68 percent 9/11. And the same thing is happening here.”

When a Fortune writer was asked whether there was a breaking-news mentality around the magazine’s office, the staffer said: “What are you going to do? Run around and shriek? There’s not a sense of a pervasive crisis.”

“When you leave New York, it’s different—things feel more dire here,” said Mr. Serwer. “I was traveling in Arkansas, Texas and California, and a lot of people are concerned, but they are not concerned to the degree we are.”

Other features, generally tied in with long-committed ad agreements, have continued to run. In its Hank Greenberg issue, Fortune included its “Most Powerful Women” feature. In its Charney issue, Portfolio included a top 50 list of the world’s most generous billionaires. On Sept. 17, Forbes released its Forbes 400 issue of the world’s richest people. Certainly not a “Sept. 11” mentality.

And Forbes, a biweekly, is now at newsstands with a cover portrait of a man in a hard hat, which is a tie-in to their annual feature on the 200 Best Small Companies.

“If you look at the cover—it combines the elements of the best small-business review and a look at the economy and looks where we’re going,” said Bill Baldwin, Forbes’ editor.

He said the magazine’s next issue, which will hit newsstands on Oct. 24, will focus primarily on the crisis, including a six-page essay by Steve Forbes that he predicts will take off.

More so than the others, and probably by virtue of its format, BusinessWeek has been responding week to week with its cover stories.

“We’re not fundamentally a long-form feature magazine,” said Steve Adler, the editor of BusinessWeek. “We’re like a newsroom where we’ve scrambled everybody. We cover businesses and beats all over the world.”

jkoblin@observer.com