Fortune Gives Facebook the Apple Treatment

Last year, Fortune magazine was so proud of an Apple cover story that it made it hard for people to read: The magazine kept the piece off the Web and only made it available to subscribers, via the print edition and an iPad app, or to people who bought the story as an Amazon e-book.

Now it is trying the same gambit, but with Mark Zuckerberg instead of Steve Jobs. If you want to read “Inside Facebook,” Miguel Helft and Jessi Hempel’s pre-IPO profile, you’ll need to pay up.

I just plunked down $1.99 for the Amazon edition, and zipped through it this morning. Like the Apple story, this one is focused on the company’s structure and management philosophy more than anything, which is quite useful for outsiders. Alas, no org chart.

And if you’re into profiles of big Silicon Valley companies in big business magazines, this is your lucky week: Businessweek’s Brad Stone profiles Twitter in a story out now.

The cover art is very promising: