Hearst's long-awaited purchase of French media conglomerate Lagardere's international magazine business is finally official. The purchase price: $887 million. The upshot: Hearst may now be the most powerful decider of the future of the magazine industry.
In your magical Monday media column: David Carey welcomes himself to Hearst, the NewsBeast gets delayed, Pat Kiernan's website is in danger, David Carr has predictions, and newspaper companies are the stock market's biggest coin flip.
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In your crowdsourced Monday media column: The Huffington Post covers the hell out of Arianna Huffington; Janice Min refuses to be spoon fed; and the New York Times lets NYU students loose on its blog.
In your melting Monday media column: perversity finds its way into the Grey Lady, fake NYT trend story may be fake, Katie Couric could return to CBS, and David Carey leaves Conde Nast.
• Portfolio isn't over and done with, after all: An affiliate of Condé Nast—based in Charlotte, weirdly—plans to revive the magazine's website. [NYO]
• Josh Marshall has accepted Maureen Dowd's apology for swiping some of his copy; and Dowd's new column today is Marshall-free, thankfully. [TPM, NYT]
• Upfronts 2009:…
Congratulations, Portfolio, on that lovely advertising spread for Apple's ultra-thin laptop on pages 2 and 3 of last month's issue. Whatever anybody's said about the magazine's editorial leadership, nobody doubts the Conde Nast title's appeal to advertisers. Ah, but then, again, there's that editorial leadership.…
Let's be generous and accept Memo Pad's word that Portfolio is selling 15-18% of the copies it ships to newsstands. (We'd heard some issues had registered as low as 12%). That's still deeply embarrassing for Conde Nast, which has committed $100m to the new business title, the biggest magazine launch in years — and…
Drew Schutte, the longtime publisher of Conde Nast's Wired, will now run the sales side of The New Yorker and its website. David Carey, publisher of Portfolio, is adding Wired to his responsibilities. [BusinessWeek]
The bespectacled magazine publisher, who ran the New Yorker's marketing and ad sales before being roped in to help Joanne Lipman launch Portfolio, has done better than merely surviving the new year's massacre at Conde Nast. He's now the leading candidate to replace Chuck Townsend as chief executive of the elite…
Today endlessly irksome media columnist Jon Friedman writes: "It's still hard to believe that a monthly, which has published a total of two issues, can seem so important. Yet Portfolio has taken on the aura of a big-budget Hollywood production, where pandemonium appears to be everywhere. Unfortunately, the magazine…
As you might have heard, Conde Nast's Portfolio launches today. The most important business magazine of its generation, Portfolio starts life with 185 ad pages in a 332-page issue. Cond chair Si Newhouse says the book was "inspired by a positive response to business articles in Vanity Fair and The New Yorker, although…
