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The Quake at Condé Nast
SIPA / Newscom
The closing of Condé Nast’s smart business glossy Portfolio is a terrible loss for the media business. But saddest of all is the unprecedented sight of the magazine world’s last big believer, Si Newhouse, throwing in the towel.
Portfolio, Condé Nast’s business magazine, got the ax today. This is terrible news. It’s not just that the cratering ad market has claimed another victim. Condé Nast chairman Si Newhouse had been admirably supportive of Portfolio for the last two years. The fact that he elected to close it, as suddenly as he folded Domino, Men’s Vogue, and the men’s fashion trade mag DNR suggests a worrying element of panic engulfing the steadfast publisher I worked for so comfortably for 17 years at Tatler, Vanity Fair, and The New Yorker.
Si Newhouse had a strong hand in the idea for Portfolio’s inception and wanted it to succeed. It was to be expected that not all the other well-coiffed 800-pound gorillas at the publisher’s upscale monthlies would be happy about Lipman’s status as Si’s new favorite.
You certainly can’t say that media commentators encouraged Newhouse to give Portfolio more time. Press coverage of the two-year-old magazine was relentlessly snotty. No one eats their young (or themselves) more hungrily than journalists.
It always baffled me why so many on the sidelines rooted so eagerly for Portfolio to fail. Its editor, Joanne Lipman, who was already a star at The Wall Street Journal, came out of the launch gate in April 2007 with a self-assured, smart competitor in the suit segment of boring business books. She ran some first-class narrative journalism such as Lloyd Grove on Sumner Redstone as King Lear and “Boomtown, Iraq” by Denis Johnson and reinvented Michael Lewis as the most influential commentator on the current economic meltdown. I remember being especially impressed by Robert Priest’s art direction. When I was flailing around at the start of Talk magazine six years before, it took me about 10 issues to get layouts that looked as crisp as the ones in Portfolio’s first issue. I think I was one of the few media snobs who liked the first Portfolio cover, an arty photograph of the New York skyline by Scott Peterman. Even though experience told me it was not the kind of cover that would exactly leap off the newsstand, it showed vitality and sophistication. Love it or hate it, at least it wasn’t the usual portrait of some spruced-up suit peering over a high-concept prop that tends to be the solution of choice in publications aimed at the boys’ club sector.
And yet rumors about Portfolio’s being “troubled” plagued Lipman from the outset. Every petty little hiccup that beset its launch was magnified as an index of its chronic malfunction. Some of the malice, no doubt, was spread from inside Condé Nast itself. The court of the Sun King is a rats’ nest of competing favorites who jostle for the 81-year-old supremo’s attention. Si Newhouse had a strong hand in the idea for Portfolio’s inception and wanted it to succeed. It was to be expected that not all the other well-coiffed 800-pound gorillas at the publisher’s upscale monthlies would be happy about Lipman’s status as Si’s new favorite.
Some of the unpleasantness was just the usual destructive hostility to process from blogosphere critics that now seems to accompany anything new. Everyone knows that it takes time to get something right, yet the inevitable trial and error of doing so is accompanied by a such a snarkfest of leaks and jeers that it distracts the staff, frightens off new contributors, and panics skittish advertisers.
Lipman shouldn't have too hard a time getting another job. She is an accomplished business journalist with a lot of fans. And most of her big-ticket writers will wind up with book deals or other Condé Nast writing gigs. But for a lot of the talented galley slaves who polished and sculpted and fact-checked and researched and copy-edited Portfolio and made it a slick and solid piece of work, it’s going to be a tough summer.
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flyoverland
I haven't like Newhouse since he shut down the old St. Louis Globe Democrat and left us with the Post Dispatch.
amf215
Tina, why is there an ad for Bottega? I find it distracting and in bad taste in this forum.
scough
"Bottega"? How funny. All the cognoscenti refer to the brand as "BV". you must feel all embarrassed and middle-class and icky.
blissfulight
He better not close the New Yorker. It's the only magazine I still subscribe to, and will continue to subscribe to, until death do us part.
scough
Death is not a distant event for most "New Yorker" subscribers.
Alexius
Anything can happen in a volatile economy. I bet even the roof on top of the venerable Anna Wintour's bob had some cracks on it. Hope The Daily Beast can sail through this storm.
..............
http://alexius-locker.blogspot.com/
rick164
Oh, give me a break Tina.
Easy to say Newhouse should keep a money-losing magazine about finance going in a deep recession--you are not writing the multi-million dollar checks to subsidize it.
This entire screed--about the bad reviews, about the owner insisting a money losing magazine close--sounds like you are still smarting over how you ran "Talk" into the ground. And you didn't even have the economy to blame. Talk sucked so did Portfolio. Good riddance.
ibisko
this is heartbreaking!
that stupid maslow and his jive hierarchy of needs.
those cry babies who just got their dental coverage cut from medicaid, and the "nasty" rotten kids who demand programs in school, don't appreciate that the homeless used to use conde nast for rainwear.
folks in iraq and afganistan , who when they come back from patrol can't wait to get their Dominoe before they gaze at the pictures of their kids.
without the traveler, what would our trip to mexico be like?
screw the polar bears..we must save vanity fair !
could the marketplace actually be indicating demand?
quinwithey
i don't think there's any saving vaniiy fair
rjcrawford33
I admit to feeling embarrassed at my schadenfreude at Portfolio's closing. But honestly, its high-roller arrogance was a sickening sight - there was snottiness on both sides. Portfolio also was more of a superficial mag than we would like to admit, an attempt to present business via gloss, instead of the slog it is for lots of us. The formula no longer works.
hockeydog
Tina, thank you for clarifying for me, that Conde' Nast was not an abbreviation for Condelezza Rice. Although I am familiar with Vanity Fair and the New Yorker, the only one of these publications referenced in your article that I am passionate about is The Atlantic.
The Atlantic has taken a page from the Beatles' playbook, by continually reinventing itself. This gives it a refreshing air. As a journal with ongoing substance, The Atlantic has also pioneered a bridge to its internet presence.
Although I haven't used that bridge very much (due to limited time on my hands), it ran an article that referred to a satellite video, on its website of special forces closing in on some miscreants on a beach. In this instance the magazine acted as a teaser for greater, in-depth coverage on its website.
The only connection I have to the Atlantic is as a reader, and subscriber, so please do not misunderstand this posting. But, this whole internet-information vs. traditional news outlet, thing is still evolving, and an ongoing process.
I think that The Daily Beast is also an ongoing process, and that when the dust finally settles, somewhat, both The Atlantic and The Daily Beast will be still standing amidst the ruins.
Keep up the good work, but trim the time alloted to the Bottega-type ads. I like your new mugshot too!
Bulldoglover100
Tina...if you ever want to beat HuffPo on the net? You need to hire more experienced and better writers than you have here. I am about to the point I am going to remove the Beast from my clicks on the computer. I am tired of the school girl rants that have no basis in fact. Hire people who are able to support their points of view with fact please. I am tired of watching them dribble spit down their chins when they write of people and things they disagree with. Rather like watching 2 dogs fight over who gets to eat the turd.
JLRoberson
Couldn't agree more. I've been watching this site since its start, and as far as I can tell, it's just about Tina Brown's friends talking amongst themselves. One could argue that's true at least of HuffPo's bloggers, but at least Arianna knows people who are in touch with current reality, while this site only shows me more and more that the cultural dominance of the northeast wanes as communication has decentralized and they have drifted further from the actual culture.
Christopher Buckley's bio picture encapsulates the sort of person thsi site gives the impression of being by and for: the out of touch moderate upper class WASP.
slobone
What she needs to do is write more often herself -- nobody's better than Tina.
Arianna wrote a column for Huffpo almost every day the first year, till she felt it was properly launched. Now she's cut back to about once a week, and the blog just ain't as good.
Banjo1
What is happening is the age of the professional writer and editor is passing. What is taking its place is the age of the amateur writer full of opinion about subjects he usually doesn't fully understand or echoes other bloggers who suffer from the same handicap. As the professionals disappear, the people who trained themselves for print media and know how to do the paint-chipping work that eventually yields a well formed and reliable piece of journalism, the public will be left with bloviators of one sort or another. We'll choose the unreliable source who best approximates our own world view and it will be as if the rest of the picture and any inconvenient truths therein don't exist. The deconstructionists say there is no truth anyhow.
scough
Zzzzzzzzzz! Snort! What? Don't bury the lead, Frenchy.
rick164
Even if you thought it was a great magazine (I did not) it was not commercially viable. Tina, please explain how they could have kept Portfolio going when ad pages were down an amazing 45% from last year. Plus the circulation was only 450,000, with 20% from free, bulk copies (usual ratio is only 10% free copies). Frequency and staff were already cut 6 months ago, and the red ink continued.
It says a lot about Tina Brown's sense of entitlement that she thinks magazines are some sort of obligation, rather than a profit making enterprise.
rittrohs
"But for a lot of the talented galley slaves who polished and sculpted and fact-checked and researched and copy-edited Portfolio and made it a slick and solid piece of work, it's going to be a tough summer."
Tina, Thanks for remembering us worker bees who toil beneath the glamour. Barb
davisull
"Everyone knows that it takes time to get something right,"
Well, actually, no, they don't. (And having time, alas, doesn't guarantee you will get it right either.)
On such shoals is the ship of journalism foundering -- the belief, jet fueled by the internet, that while any individual may know more about any particular subject than I do, all are equal in judging what it all means, and if I disagree with your conclusion, it's because you're an entitled elitist, an arrogant bloviator, whatever -- not that, perhaps, you might have access to more information than I do, or training or ability to judge its meaning. It really puzzles me, the number of people who feel that drawing a conclusion based on reporting and editing is beyond what a journalist should do.
Steak1
I'm certainly sad to see good magazine journalists lose their jobs in this climate, but not so sad to see Portfolio go away. A lot of the magazines that have failed lately seem to have something in common: They were launched to create an advertising environment more than to serve a demand from potential readers. Was there really a large demographic of business magazine readers who wanted an alternative that was glossier, fancier, and more stylishly written than Fortune, Forbes et al? You could level the same criticism at Best Life, Domino, Men's Vogue, and many other titles that have left the building. They all seem like great places for a Lexus ad, but without serving the real needs of real readers, some magazines may deserve to die.
wrywriter
Portfolio was very pretty but that was about it. It never "mattered," was never a "must read." That's a failure of the editorial team at the top.
The ultimate mistake, however, was to start it with a fire hose of money; Si would have been better off to make it Conde-worthy without adding so much ballast that it couldn't fly. Portfolio wound up being gold-plated but hollow. There were lots of A-list names but they didn't have much interesting to say.
I'm just sorry to see writers, editors, etc. out of work.
Thank you.
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