The Quake at Condé Nast

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That’s sad. What’s even sadder is the unprecedented sight of the magazine world’s last big believer, Si Newhouse, exhibiting what looks like signs of throwing in the towel.

To own magazines or newspapers (or movie studios for that matter), you have to love what you own with almost impractical passion. Such passion was shyly evident in the owner of The Atlantic magazine, David Bradley, in a piece by Howard Kurtz in the Washington Post. The story discussed Bradley’s coveted off-the-record dinners with top Washington players like Tim Geithner and Rahm Emanuel. The dinners, it is clear, play no real business or journalistic purpose. Bradley started them, he admitted to Kurtz, “for the romance.” Owning magazines has always been the sexiest calling card in pursuit of a more interesting social life.

Si, to his credit, never much liked going out, but he’s always loved the vicarious thrill brought to him by entering his magazines’ worlds. That, as much as commercial success, was always the prime return on his investment. It was his passion for the smarter, edgier, more adventurous glossies like Vanity Fair, Condé Nast Traveler (founded by my husband), The New Yorker—and, dare I say it, Portfolio and Domino—that kept him patient for profit.

But that was then and this is now. Today the great Newhouse empire originally built on newspapers no longer looks impervious to downturn. (The Internet has never seriously interested Si—it’s too granular, too physically insubstantial.) He’s a great collector of art, and it’s not surprising that he prefers the sensual luxury of his glossy pages. Until now, he was always the media emperor who could live and do as he chose.

But there has been a lurching inconsistency to the way he closed down clever, promising Domino (and then, I am told, experienced regret when he read its glowing obituaries) and cut back Portfolio’s excellent Web site while vowing to keep the magazine alive—only to close it anyway. All this is so unlike Si that it’s a scary sign of how desperate the times are for the magazine-publishing business.

And worse, without Si, there are few other options.

Domino was a beautiful bauble, but its disappearance was a fairly minor loss to the wider culture. Portfolio had the potential not only to help us understand the complex issues of the volatile economy but help police the business world and keep (or make) it honest. Now we have to trust the Obama administration to be on that particular case. When Si Newhouse bought The New Yorker, though, he took upon himself the responsibility for an institution that is part of the nation’s cerebral cortex. Let’s hope this pitiless economy doesn’t force him to cap his noble career by performing a lobotomy.

Tina Brown is the founder and editor in chief of The Daily Beast. She is the author of the 2007 New York Times bestseller The Diana Chronicles. Brown is the former editor of Tatler, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, and Talk magazines and host of CNBC's Topic A with Tina Brown.

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