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A bidding war ultimately ensued, pitting The Economist against Mansueto's company Mansueto Ventures. Byrne contacted entrepreneur Joe Mansueto and helped guide him through the sale. In 2005, Gruner + Jahr put the magazine, as well as Inc. Although the magazine was not specifically about Internet commerce, advertising pages continued to drop until they were one-third the 2000 numbers. But the magazine could not reverse its financial decline in the wake of the dot-com bust. Under Byrne, the magazine won its first Gerald Loeb Award, the most prestigious honor in business journalism. Byrne, previously a senior writer and former management editor with BusinessWeek, was brought in as the new editor. Webber and Taylor left the magazine two years later in 2002, and John A. Just as the sale was completed, the dot-com bubble burst, leading to significant losses and a decline in circulation. In 2000, Zuckerman sold Fast Company to Gruner + Jahr, majority owned by media giant Bertelsmann, for $550 million. At one point the Company of Friends had over 40,000 members in 120 cities, although by 2003 that number had declined to 8,000. In 1997, Fast Company created an online social network, the "Company of Friends" which spawned a number of groups that began meeting. The publication's early competitors included Red Herring, Business 2.0 and The Industry Standard. Adam Lashinsky, former executive editor of Fortune Magazine, who co-chaired the annual Fortune Brainstorm Tech conference with Mehta, describes her as an “every-position-of-the-field-player.” Hers is a modest power, but one that has taken her far in the competitive, brisk-paced world of media, driven largely by a versatile talent capable of reporting, editing, and moderating discussions across a vast array of topics.Īsk her about her distinguished career - spanning nearly three decades and publications including The Wall Street Journal, Fortune, Bloomberg, and Vanity Fair - and she attributes that success to a simple combination of “really good luck and hard work.Fast Company was launched in November 1995 by Alan Webber and Bill Taylor, two former Harvard Business Review editors, and publisher Mortimer Zuckerman. When I speak to other executives in her industry, they praise Mehta for her “old school” nature, for her universality rather than for her eccentricity.
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The 51-year-old media veteran doesn’t aim to be a large personality, something her peers echo. She has pushed for diversity in both editorial coverage and conferences, launching Fast Company’s Queer 50 list in 2020 and Vanity Fair’s Founders Fair conference for women entrepreneurs in 2017.īut spend time with Mehta, even over Zoom, and you don’t sense a hint of bravado. Not only is she the first female editor-in-chief of Fast Company since the magazine rolled off the presses in November 1995, but she’s also one of the few South Asian faces in an industry largely dominated by white men. In many ways, Stephanie Mehta has broken the mold for what it means to be a journalist in business and tech.