Conde Nast Portfolio Magazine

Eric Kallgren    Boulder Colorado USA

Posted at 9:29pm on Thursday, May 21st, 2009

Portfolio magazine, without "Conde Nast" in front of the name, will be reincarnated as a web site. It will be operated by American City Business Journals, which along with Conde Nast Publications is owned by Advance Publications. The company released this statement:

May 20, 2009 ­ Portfolio.com will become part of the American City Business Journal's bizjournals.com effective in July, it was announced today by Tim Bradbury, President, American City Business Journals, New Media, (ACBJ) and David Carey, Group President, Condé Nast. ACBJ and Condé Nast are units of Advance Publications.

Bizjournals.com will oversee both the editorial and business sides of the site. The Portfolio.com editorial team and sales staff will be based in New York. In addition to newly created content, the site will share content with other Condé Nast sites including Wired.com, GolfDigest.com, and WWD.com, as it did previously. The site will also be the home of the archives of all the popular content published by Portfolio's print and digital properties over the last two years.

"We are excited about continuing Portfolio.com and including the site in the bizjournals network because we were impressed by Portfolio's strong web presence, its clean and crisp design, and its voice in the business journalism marketplace," Tim Bradbury, President, American City Business Journals, New Media said. "We believe our readers will benefit as the re-launched Portfolio.com will have a stronger focus on industry news and a greater mission to offer information relevant to today's business professionals."

On top of its existing strengths, Portfolio.com will be able to leverage the collaborative skills and insights of the more than 600 ACBJ business journalists around the country. The site now will have access to local market intelligence and work collaboratively with ACBJ newsrooms across the country, presenting the most important local insights through a national lens and making it unique among national business media.

"We knew that Portfolio.com was a highly valuable asset, with an established digital brand, strong direct navigation by users, and a solid long tail of traffic from content published over the past two years," David Carey, Group President, Condé Nast said. "We saw ACBJ as a perfect match due to its great editorial resources in the business arena, and view this as a win for both Portfolio.com¹s readers and the company."

Condé Nast Portfolio magazine and its website Portfolio.com, launched in April 2007 and the magazine closed in April 2009. The site provided insight into the day's top business stories, with analysis from bloggers and columnists. During those two years Portfolio.com grew to 2.8 million monthly uniques and won industry praise with awards such as the MIN: Best of Web 2008, MIN: Hottest Launch of the Year 2007, WebAward: Outstanding Achievement in Website Development 2007, and Webby nominees in Best Business
blog and Financial Services categories.

Eric Kallgren    Boulder, Colorado USA

Posted at 10:26pm on Wednesday, April 29th, 2009

Paul Smalera, a Portfolio staff writer who was laid off before the magazine shut down, says that editor-in-chief Joanne Lipman was overbearing and in over her head, and that's the nice part. Smalera wrote at Gawker on April 27, 2009, the same day the magazine was shut down:

"When others at the magazine tried to inject their talents into the dialogue by questioning the wisdom of certain articles, certain cover choices, word choices, headlines, etc., Lipman was not interested in hearing from them if their ideas about those things differed from hers. Editorial meetings evolved from an initially respectful differing of opinions among equals into contentious, adversarial affairs. When Lipman took any advice at all, it usually came from the top deputies she brought with her from the Journal. Yet despite her tight grip on the magazine's editorial content, there was the obvious scattershot, disconnected mix of stories and covers, and the pendulum swung wildly from issue to issue. Lipman's means of survival and ascension at the Journal soon became clear with firings and departures and freeze outs at Portfolio: they had less to do with editorial acumen and more to do with knowing how to squash revolutions and power plays.

A fine way to run an empire, and clearly a page from the cutthroat world of high finance that every Journal staffer knows intimately. But it was never her empire to run, nor was it really an empire at all. The rulers were ultimately the readers, because readership leads to advertisers. And readers were given short shrift at Portfolio. Fine, they got a bound magazine each month, with elegant covershots of hideous men, pretty and expensive photography inside, and very beautiful design. It looked pretty important, except maybe the one with Dov Charney on the cover. But its beauty was, at its best, skin deep."

The full story:
http://gawker.com/5229944/inside-fort-polio-a-former-staffer-on-what-went-wrong

Eric Kallgren    Boulder, Colorado USA

Posted at 11:10am on Monday, April 27th, 2009

The end has come for Conde Nast Portfolio, Conde Nast Publications Group President David Carey announced on April 27, 2009:

"Earlier today, Condé Nast announced, quite regrettably, that it is pulling back from its investment in Portfolio.

For this high-profile, 21-issue launch, the recession has helped and hurt the brand. While the unprecedented nature of these times has made business and the economy the main topic of conversation, it has also led to high levels of uncertainty and a tremendous reduction in ad spend in the five key sectors Portfolio's business model depends on.

The company is deeply grateful to Portfolio's readers, for the support of its many friends in the advertising community who worked so closely with Joanne Lipman and William Li, and to the many journalists who keep such a keen interest in all things related to this introduction."

Jeff Bercovici, the media blogger at Portfolio.com, added this:

"Our editor in chief, Joanne Lipman, just broke the news to staff, saying the decision had been made "because of financial reasons at Advance," Condé Nast's parent company. "It's not anything that the company wanted to do." She said she was informed by Condé Nast chairman S.I. Newhouse Jr. this morning of the decision."

Eric Kallgren    Boulder, Colorado USA

Posted at 1:01pm on Monday, April 20th, 2009

The roof caved in and the floor gave way for advertising sales at Conde Nast Portfolio in the first quarter of 2009, the Publishers Information Bureau (PIB) reported on April 14, 2009.

Portfolio magazine advertising dollars fell 48.8%, and ad page sales cratered with a 60.9% drop.

For all 250 consumer magazines tracked by the PIB, first quarter 2009 ad pages dropped 25.9% and ad dollars fell 20.2%.