Take this quote from Jesse Eisinger, a senior staff writer: “He’s made the trains run on time in some basic, fundamental way that as a start-up we were having problems with.” Later in the piece, an anonymous staffer, quite possibly Eisinger again on background, explains that Lipman brought in newspaper veterans who didn't understand that magazines required a proper mix of stories. “I don’t think everyone understood that coming in here, and I think they’re still learning it, but it’s basic stuff for magazine people.”

As for Lewis, he toes the line. But the Conde Nast veteran does that he wanted a broader job and more editorial input than he was allowed as managing editor of David Remnick's New Yorker. I'm sure there are differences in the job specification, but a deputy's role is always more interesting under a leader as weak as Lipman.

So why would Lipman cooperate with a glowing profile of Portfolio's new regime that could only show her tenure in a poor light? Maybe she doesn't have a choice. The magazine needs all the good press it can get, even at the expense of her reputation; and she can no longer command deference from Koblin's interviewees. Portfolio's power cover, showing a woman's stilletoed foot subjugated by a male business shoe, was truer than it knew.

I think it was the fairly harmless post I wrote on Manolo Blahnik joining the internet revolution that first drew my attention to the posts that were being written about me on Jezebel, part of the Gawker Media empire. (They'd been calling me Laurie Goldstein Crowe for a while...) I hadn't been bullied that badly since Vicki Dembo put my red patent-leather boots with the white platform heels into the trash can in 6th grade.

It kind of stung but the absurd number of mistakes they made — calling me Laurie, saying that I hated the Tom Ford store when in fact I loved it (note to Moe: time to cut back on those uppers!) — lessened the bite. I was advised by my fairy blogfather Felix Salmon not to respond unless I could be funny enough — and I couldn't, so I didn't. Good advice!

...I took solace in the fact that the hated-by-Gawker club included many people I have worked with and consider friends, including "3-olives-a-day" Anne Slowey and Joel Stein, and that the items on me generated very few hits, so the people writing them weren't earning much money off my back.

There's no evidence that the order came from Conde Nast bigwigs, who are generally relaxed about inter-title criticism; and Gladwell wrote us in an email that he hadn't asked for the post's removal. "No idea what you're talking about I'm afraid," said Gladwell. "Bercovici wrote about me?" But the embattled Lipman, unpopular among her own staff, depends on the goodwill of Newhouse. The most plausible explanation for the deletion: Lipman pre-emptively ordered the removal of the post to save Gladwell, the New Yorker and Conde Nast, from embarrassment. How collegial! Except, by deleting an item which would otherwise have been unremarked, Portfolio's succeeded only in drawing the attention of Slate's eagle-eyed Jack Shafer, and various blogs like this one. And the original post still remains, like a rebuke, in Google's cache of the Portfolio site. Here's the original article and, below, the page as it now appears.

Morale has always been low here, but it's never been
lower, and the downcline (to quote our Treasury
secretary) is steepening.

The only reason there's been no mass exodus is because
the pay is good, nobody else is hiring, and the
economy is at the abyss.

Many magazines develop into factions. At Portfolio,
the factions are quite lopsided. It's every last
person at the magazine versus Joanne Lipman, Amy
Stevens, and Kyle Pope. (With new managing editor
Jacob Lewis, who came over from The New Yorker,
bewildered and privately neutral, but loyal to Joanne
because that's his job.)

There's nothing new about Joanne's infuriations.
What's troublesome is that Conde Nast allows them go
on and on and on. The only thing predictable about
Joanne Lipman is that nobody has a frigging clue what
she wants. She orders up one thing and condemns the
editors for delivering it. She can't explain her story
judgment, and no one knows whether that's because she
has none, or because her mind is so internally
confused that even she doesn't know what she is
thinking from day to day or hour to hour.

Worst of all: outside of finance and advertising, she
knows squat about business, and maybe finance and
advertising too. The result is a mess of a magazine.
What's it supposed to be? If the readers don't know,
and the advertisers don't know, it's because the staff
doesn't know, and if Joanne knows she's not doing a
very good job of explaining it.

It's all too bad because Portfolio could have been so
good. "The Vanity Fair of business magazines" is an
idea that sounded great to most of us who joined up
here. But the opportunity is being pissed away.

Joanne gave a speech a week or so ago in which she
revealed that after she left her first meeting with Si
Newhouse, before she was hired, she was so happy she
could have been hit by a truck. This was interpreted
here as a plea to Si not to throw her in front of that
truck now. (Her kids must have been pleased to hear
that she regards a lunch with Si as the highlight of
her life.)

People tell me that calls for Joanne's head will
ensure her continued tenure, because Si will dig in
his heels.

But Si, you're a smart business person. She's wrecking
your magazine. Talk to the staff, they'll tell you.
You need to do something about it, before it's too
late for everybody.

As soon as Wall Street starts showing signs of serious troubles, people start wondering whether upscale magazines are going to fold. It's a possibility, of course, but only for those that aren't firmly entrenched with their target demographic (the rich). For those that are accepted as leaders in whatever luxury category they happen to be pimping, they should be able to ride out the wave just fine, because a rich person losing money can still afford a magazine, while a poor person can't.

Doubledown Media, publisher of knowingly ostentatious mags like Trader Monthly and Private Air, is doing great, according to the New York Times. The grandaddy of wealthy magazines, The Robb Report, has also seen its ad pages increase over the past year. When your average reader makes $650K, as Trader Monthly's does, you can take some bumps in the market in stride.

Trader Monthly and similar publications do not need to worry "until their readers give up their private planes," Mr. Phillips said.

This is particularly true for Private Air.

But wait! All is not well in luxury land. While specific magazines might be doing fine if their roots run deep enough, the category as a whole is obviously going to be impacted by an economic downturn and smaller bonuses on Wall Street. Advertisers will feel that decrease in disposable income and, consequently, conspicuous consumption.WWD runs a "maybe, could be, too early to tell" type of story on the prospect of a luxury downturn, but does point out that the New York market is insulated by foreign money pouring in here because of the cheap dollar.

Who really has to worry about an economic climate like this? Mega titles like Portfolio, which need a huge volume of luxury ads to justify their huge investments, but also need a broader audience than just top-tier employees in the investment industry. Portfolio is especially vulnerable because it has thus far failed to establish an editorial vision compelling enough to make most business people consider it a must-read. At this point it's only reliably read by Gawker employees—and we don't buy any luxury items. It's a quandary.

Gawker Media
Our publisher Nick Denton loves to point out that no major media company could buy Gawker and keep up the site's outsider angle. Of course he wants you to believe Gawker does something special and to think of it as a competitor to decades-old media empires. But he's not lying.

When this network tried licensing stories to Yahoo News two years ago, the editors bitched about it (this was before he replaced them with inexperienced, unsure toadies like me), and the stories never did well. Gawker and Yahoo let the contract expire, and while Denton pretended it was because I kept maligning Yahoo execs on our Silicon Valley site Valleywag, it was really because no one was reading Gawker on Yahoo. Their audience just wasn't interested.

Imagine you were running this show. Why sell it and either work under some executive who probably hates you for some five-year-old blog post, or struggle to start another business that becomes this influential? It's easy to say Denton is in this for the money, but only if you've never seen the man revel in his own role. He doesn't want to be rich, he wants to be Rupert Murdoch.

TechCrunch
Before he started Silicon Valley's most influential blog, Michael Arrington (pictured demonstrating caution and humility in Business 2.0) was a successful lawyer, but this didn't make him much of an analyst. Despite frequently getting his story utterly wrong, he built influence by covering every startup that would talk to him. Tech writer Paul Boutin figured it out: TechCrunch wasn't a news source, it was a phone directory, and that's what the Valley wanted. Arrington used his local influence to earn a few scoops, and now he's an unignorable player in tech reporting.

But it's all him. Most press about TechCrunch is actually about Arrington. None of his writers are breakaway talents. And while the blog probably makes over a million a year in ad revenue, TechCrunch also makes plenty from its conferences (and "parties" where startups pay to demo products for liquored up biz-dev guys). As with Gawker, the publisher makes the brand. If Arrington sold but stayed in charge, he might have to stop writing dramatic posts like "When will we have our first Valleywag suicide?" If he left the blog, what's left? A staff of amateurish writers who can't get the scoops Arrington gets?

Boing Boing
Boing Boing is owned by its four idiosyncratic writers, who act like the blog is still the small-time zine it started out as in the 90s. For example, Cory Doctorow always pushes his anti-copyright agenda, and Mark Frauenfelder owns the ukulele news beat. That's why the blog remains popular even when sites like Digg theoretically replaced the its role as a clearinghouse for Internet memes. The blog was getting nearly a million views per day before the team stopped publicly reporting traffic, but at its heart it's a personal blog, and selling it would be like selling a favorite pet: theoretically possible but against the whole point. Besides, they all have other work that they can promote to their Boing Boing fans, and that's more valuable than ad revenue.

Weblogs, Inc.
The network of over thirty blogs made sense for AOL because it was already a non-personality-based news farm that paid under $10 per post (even lower than Gawker Media at that point), churning out consumer-friendly content. Since then, most of its blogs fell behind competitors, except for the still wildly successful Engadget tech blog. Founder Jason Calacanis was indeed in it for the money, and he left the network soon after the sale to try relaunching Netscape as a social news site (the project failed and is now just a section on the Netscape web site). Calacanis's new project, a web directory, is even less personality-based. Maybe a blog network could replicate Weblogs's success, but it would have to focus on a niche, as no one will manage to dominate as many topics as Weblogs did.

Everyone Else
Well all the others are too small, aren't they? If you want to hire a writer, you could buy his blog and immediately dissolve it, but there's no point adding an existing blog to an existing media outlet.

Most magazines, TV networks and newspapers have already launched blogs with current and new staff. It's cheaper and avoids creative conflicts. Plus blogs always have a lower revenue-per-pageview rate than the media sites that could buy them, so any acquired blog would have to be integrated into the buyer's ad inventory.

For the record, Gawker Media doesn't buy blogs, but Denton's hired at least three people who started blogs about Gawker.

After the Portfolio story, the Times said:

Mr. Berenson did receive a misdirected e-mail from Pepper, but that e-mail did not contain a detailed description of the status of the settlement talks. Mr. Berenson had known independently about the settlement talks for some time, and he obtained the details he published in the Times from sources other than Pepper.

The Portfolio version was incorrect.

What the Times didn't say is that Berenson's prior "independent" knowledge of the Lilly talks was on an off-the-record basis, as revealed in the NPR excerpt below, and that the email became the trigger for new reporting by Berenson in which Berenson described the email, a potent piece of leverage, to at least one source. Also, while the two-sentence email — read aloud in the full NPR piece — was short, it was also the the point, explaining who Eli Lilly was negotiating with, that they wanted a deal and how the feds were looking for a settlement "in the stratosphere ."

The lawyer who accidentally emailed the Times reporter clearly had him in an autocomplete contacts list; the natural question (already raised elsewhere) is "why?" Was the lawyer a source? After speaking with Berenson, NPR said the reporter has been in "disputes with the law firm... about his stories in the past," so it is possible the lawyer had emailed him complaints.

Strange, then, that Berenson has gone to such lengths to protect the emailer, including by acceding to the lawyer's request to omit the incident from his story on the topic. He also clammed up when Portfolio called, but nevertheless ended up on NPR, allegedly to set the record straight. Including about the existence of his new book, which was plugged at the end of his appearance.

[NPR/On The Media]

The novelist, modelizing author of Bright Lights, Big City, was commissioned to explore Art Basel Miami. The belated piece hardly touches on the art market, the only excuse Portfolio has to cover the event. According to our informant, McInerney, who was likely paid more than $30,000, went to a few parties, and dropped a few names in a sloppy account that he bashed out on the plane home. "Can't blame the guy for scamming, but how pathetic that we commissioned it and then ran it."

Bonus quote from the author, who chronicled the excesses of New York nightlife of the 1980s.

We were more interested in having fun and drinking vodkas and snorting cocaine when we could get it and staying up all night. It wasn't very conducive to fact-checking. [Guardian]

First of all, we're used to magazines rehashing old stories, and presenting them as new. But this isn't just dusty, it's ancient. Here's Portfolio's intro: "The Watergate era's second-most memorable crook, Robert Vesco, started out with nothing, enjoyed his brief moment as a low-life financial genius, and ended up imprisoned at home. In Cuba. We think." Now here's another feature, in Fortune: "Stalking Robert Vesco: Once America's most famous rascal, the fugitive embezzler now lives in Havana in modest seclusion, surrounded by armed guards." Sound familiar? That profile, by Arthur Herzog, was from 1986, twenty years ago.

At least Herzog managed to track down Cornfeld's notorious henchman. Fox reporter James Rosen, who adds very little to the earlier story, had to rely on second-hand sources. At least Portfolio's head of research came from the prissy New Yorker, and the fact checkers must have checked out the notes and documentation. But we hear that the author said that he'd lost the material "in a flood". (I'll have to remember that excuse.)

So why would Joanne Lipman publish an old story which didn't even check out? Before being picked by S.I. Newhouse's Conde Nast to launch its $100m business magazine, ran the soft, weekend section of the Wall Street Journal. The brittle editrix is famously, almost proudly ignorant of business journalism, preferring fiction. The Vesco story was news to her. That's fine. Portfolio is lifestyle pap for rich men, not an investigations unit. Sure, Rosen's rehash gets no play on the front cover; and the intro is extremely tentative ("In Cuba. We think.") — as it should be. The magazine is a team: even if Lipman doesn't have much judgment when it comes to business journalism, her colleagues do. Too bad, then, that she went ahead against universal opposition. The result is a fiasco for a magazine that, with lagging newsstand sales and poor buzz, really can't really afford one — and one for which Portfolio's vulnerable editor carries sole responsibility.