But over the next year, there's still some work to do. For one, many observers remain skeptical of Portfolio's premise as a monthly magazine, questioning its immediacy among business Web sites and weekly publications. Fortune publishes biweekly, Business Week and the Economist are weeklies and Yahoo Finance and cnnmoney.com are 24/7, up-to-the-second news sources. Lipman argues there is a need for an analytical approach to the economy in a long-form outlet.

"The whole news cycle has sped up," said Lipman. "And for real-time news on the Internet, that's great. For print, what we lost as a reader were the deeply reported pieces that gave you some perspective, that took the incremental news stories from the day and put them together." Couple that with a cutback in resources to financial reporting and the increased intersection in business and culture, and you have more outlets reporting more headlines of business news as opposed to in-depth reports.

"The business publications with their reduced staffing, their increased demands on the staffers and the pressure of filing constantly and never being able to dig deep — what that meant was nobody was connecting the dots with the business community and the impact at large."

Lipman argues that Portfolio fills that void. But it still has to establish the brand recognition of most of its competitors — which is another goal over the next 12 months.

"My goal is to raise our profile in the rest of the business community," Lipman said.

To help orchestrate more face time between Lipman and top executives, the magazine brought on events director Courtney Dolan. "We'll have a series of lunches and coffees where we're meeting ceo's," said Lipman. "I'm getting out more. In the first year of a launch I worked close to the ground. Now we have a great bench."

And it isn't as if Lipman has been oblivious to the criticisms — especially of the magazine's covers. While prelaunch the hype was that Portfolio would marry in-depth reporting with beautiful photography, the conceptual covers have left many scratching their heads. The May issue, out Monday, will be the first to have an identifiable personality on the cover, to illustrate its "Brilliant" package (Hannah Montana was considered for the cover, but was not chosen). Another addition is a new back-page column called Exit Interview, where a prominent executive leaving his or her job will give pithy details on their tenure. EBay's Meg Whitman will be the inaugural subject.