With a boss like Si Newhouse, it seems doubtful that Lipman should get too comfortable. She does have a couple of things going for her: Her credentials (Ivy League, WSJ) are strong, which Newhouse respects; and the fact that she is a woman who has worked her way up. One only has to look at the histories of Vogue editor Anna Wintour and former Vanity Fair and New Yorker editor Tina Brown to see that Newhouse has never backed down from supporting women in top editorial posts even when others questioned his decision. In those cases, his commitment paid off. With Lipman, the payoff is far less assured.

And here's what she should really think about: the newest rumor is that Conde Nast execs have now started to whisper about supposed distinctions between a "launch editor" and an actual, long-term editor. Lipman oversaw Portfolio's launch, and garnered herself a lot of critics in the process. Creating a situation in which "launch editor" was considered a job in itself—and not an automatic qualification as editor-in-chief for years to come—could conceivably be a way to gently ease Lipman out in favor of someone more popular and experienced. Thanks for the help with the launch, we'll handle the rest now, Joanne!

Would Si Newhouse buy into such a plan? It's impossible to know! He is loath to be pressured into decisions, which could actually work in Lipman's favor. Everyone will have to wait for the quiet boss in the raggedy clothes to make up his mind.

[NYT]

After all, Vanity Fair's position in Hollywood—where the magazine throws the hottest Oscar night party and has its pick of Hollywood stars for cover shoots—is hardly threatened by a one-year-old and troubled business magazine. Vanity Fair and Portfolio are part of the same company, for chrissake; and both deny the story—all be it half-heartedly. But petty infighting at Si Newhouse's publishing group is always plausible.

Ever since Alex Liberman's tenure as editorial director of Condé Nast, the group has been a collection of rival territories managed only by pitting the barons against eachother.

Vogue's Anna Wintour was installed as creative director under Grace Mirabella, the legendary editor to whom she was the anointed successor. Wintour and Vanity Fair's Tina Brown—both kicky English imports—fought for the favor of Liberman and Newhouse, and over stories; Brown wrote up a lunch with Princess Diana that Wintour had arranged as a private affair, and later ran a nasty exposé of her former colleague's businessman boyfriend. And Tina Brown was so put out by when shifted to the New Yorker that she sabotaged her successor, Graydon Carter.

Writes Judy Bachrach in Tina And Harry Come To America: Graydon Carter arrived at Vanity Fair the following week and found—nothing. There was a backlog of stories that had been sitting in a kill pile, articles previously considered by Tina or her editors that were, for one reason or another, deemed unfit for the magazine. But aside from this cache, Carter was left with no immediate resources: there was no indication of what pieces might go into succeeding issues, no drawerful of ideas. Vanity Fair always planned moths ahead, even if those plans never materialized. "Nothing, nothing, nothing," was the description of what had been left behind.

So, yes, Waxman's story—that Graydon Carter has prevailed on Hollywood friends such as Brian Grazer, Jim Wiatt and Brad Grey to keep Portfolio from any big Hollywood gets—is entirely plausible. Portfolio's lead Hollywood correspondent Amy Wallace is “being blacklisted a little bit," a former editor tells Waxman. Wallace declined to comment, which means she probably confirmed the suspicion to her friend Waxman.

J.K.: Do you have any interest in real estate?

L.G.: Only in the pornographic sense that everybody else does.

J.K.: Real estate is like porn for rich people.

L.G.: So what possessed you to go buy a dinosaur? This is, like, so old-media. Isn't it a bit yesterday?

J.K.: Well, I would say two things. People are hysterical about the death of newspapers and I would say they're not dying, they're just kind of reinventing themselves. What the ultimate body count is in reinvention is still to be determined, but the difference between a weekly and a daily is that my product is a country home, whereas a daily is your primary residence.

L.G.: Now when people come to you, as I'm sure they do, and they just read something snarky about themselves in the Observer, and you have a business or social relationship with them, and they say "Jesus Christ, Jared, look at what your paper did to me"—what do you do in those situations?

J.K.: Well, I think people for the most part are very respectful and they know that I'm a publisher who has strong belief in editorial independence. And I'm very fortunate to surround myself with great people, and I believe that you hire good chefs and you let them shop for the groceries and cook.

He's so rich!

[Portfolio]

Jack Flack, posted at 9:15 p.m. on May 3:

Parsing Ballmer-to-Yang: See You Again Real Soon, Buddy...

Ballmer: Dear Jerry:

Translation: I'm pinning this on you personally. Not your board. Not Bill Miller. You!

Ballmer: After over three months, we have reached the conclusion of the process regarding a possible combination of Microsoft and Yahoo!.

Translation: This is the letter you've been waiting for. Try not to quiver.

Ballmer: I first want to convey my personal thanks to you, your management team, and Yahoo!'s Board of Directors for your consideration of our proposal.

Translation: I want to do a monkey dance on your neck, but instead I'm going to demonstrate civility. I want to come off as the rational one in this thing.

Etc.

WSJ's Deal Journal, posted May 3 at 9:41 p.m.:

Microsoft-Yahoo: Translating Ballmer's Letter...

And now the letter from Ballmer to Yang:

Dear Jerry:

Thanks for nothing, Jerry:

After over three months, we have reached the conclusion of the process regarding a possible combination of Microsoft and Yahoo!.

We really hope the market really thinks we're walking. Because we want to be able to cut a new deal in a few months when your stock price is still getting killed.

I first want to convey my personal thanks to you, your management team, and Yahoo!'s Board of Directors for your consideration of our proposal....

Thanks for nothing.

Etc.

Okay, they went up at close to the same time, so it's very possible the WSJ never even saw Jack Flack's piece before it put up its own. But the man has been "Parsing" the whole Microsoft-Yahoo thing in more than a dozen posts over three months. Give credit where credit is due!

[UPDATE: WSJ Deal Journal writer Dennis Berman emails to point out that he has done similar "Translating" posts before, such as this one from April 5, 2007. So it's likely he wasn't ripping off the idea from Portfolio.com. A fair point. I'm still in favor of giving Jack Flack the exclusive trademark on "Parsing." But we can say "Translating" will now belong to Deal Journal. Update your dictionaries accordingly.]

I guess if you want to get technical about it, Julia Allison is employed by a magazine. But her main occupation is fameball. So when I saw her, in a white dress, dramatically posing for photos as if she was getting married, it made me question whether these magazine awards were supposed to be some sort of society event. Apparently so! The following people showed up to present awards, for no discernible reason whatsoever:

• Anderson Cooper. Who did not say anything gay.
• Former New Yorker editor and current Clinton family stalker Tina Brown. "She looks like Hillary," someone whispered loudly when she appeared.
• The aforementioned Padma Lakshmi. She said some stuff about her food show, too.
• Former baseball star turned investor turned magazine publisher Lenny Dykstra. Though he can't be 50 years old yet, he shuffled, mumbled, and spoke with his mouth an inch from the mike in a disquieting impression of Muhammad Ali in the throes of Parkinson's disease. Or maybe it wasn't an impression.
• Obama girl.
• New York City Police Commissioner Ray Kelly. Who, after the ceremony, was deep in conversation with New Yorker editor David Remnick. A conversation I imagine going like this:

  KELLY: Congratulations on the award.

  REMNICK: Thanks. Coincidentally, we're going to be doing an investigative piece on the NYPD soon.

  KELLY: You are under arrest.

• Judah Friedlander and two other people from 30 Rock. They also made awkward, jokey attempts to somehow tie their show to the magazine industry. Not their fault, though. My guess is they were just as mystified that they were there as anyone else.
• Charlie Rose

The "Nick Denton Could Make This A Metaphor" moment of the night: Portfolio editor Joanne Lipman, after receiving an award, tried to walk off stage the wrong way, and had to turn around and double back.

And here, the night in poor pictures. I'm having some trouble aligning them correctly, so I will put the captions here, and the pictures below. 1. The view from the ballroom, and also what this crowd of media honchos controls: the world. 2. Here, Anderson Cooper, live on stage! It's really him, I promise! 3. Police Commissioner Ray Kelly walks away from me in fear after I challenge him to a debate on media consolidation laws. 4. Fameball Julia Allison and New York Magazine writer Vanessa Grigoriadis, whose article about this site was nominated for an award last night. They're both very personable!

That's about it.

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.

It's totally true. Lipman ignored the advice she got early on not to hire people on staff (what monthly has a bunch of high level staff writers? Even at the New Yorker, where they're called staff writers, they're actually all under contract!) But Lipman, in her infinite wisdom, decided that she wouldn't be able to get her hack friends from the WSJ to come over unless they had staff gigs. But now, Jacob Lewis, the ME sent in by SI to clean things up, has been going around to try to convince these writers to go on contract. His pitch is that that way writers will own their own stuff (if you're staff, theoretically your stuff is owned by CN) so you can be anthologized! Great: $300 to be in some crummy anthology versus getting health insurance, 401K, pension and being MUCH harder to fire by the capricious talentless nut job you now know you're working for in an economic climate that makes it impossible to get other work. Hmmmmm. Any takers?

New Yorker staff writers are on contract? There is no dream.

Like another contributor in the current issue, Jay McInerney, Johnson is a novelist: he won the National Book Award for his novel Tree of Smoke. Like McInerney, author of Bright Lights, Big City (who covers Art Basel in Miami as if the art show were merely an extension of his sodden New York nights), Johnson is out of place in a business magazine, or in fact-based journalism, for that matter.

The Tree of Smoke author's mission was to "touch" the oil pipeline and, presumably, convey the majesty as only a novelist can. He barely made it out of the Sheraton hotel's breakfast room in Erbil, staying within the safe confines of American-friendly Kurdistan. Our informant tells Gawker that Portfolio's Bill Tonelli, a favorite of editor Joanne Lipman and the commissioning editor on the piece, kept the draft to himself for two weeks while he himself phoned Iraq to work some facts into the story.

Johnson was impressed by the economic vitality of Kurdistan. Why hasn't it been recognized by journalists from the New York Times and CNN, he wonders. "Here's a guess, just one possibility: because journalists are pimps for war, my friends, in burgundy velvet suits. And that's the news from here." Here's another guess, just one possibility: because real reporters do, occasionally, leave the five-star hotels that so impressed Portfolio's coddled author.

So, has Joanne Lipman's vain effort, to turn novelists into business journalists, finally run its course? Don't bank on it. Portfolio's brittle editor, famously ignorant of journalistic precedent, has the ambition to nurture writers in the way that GQ and Talk once managed, and a long wish list to work through. Top of her list: best-selling creator of Alex Cross, the African-American forensic psychologist, James Patterson.

Addendum: Where is Howell Raines, Portfolio's media critic? When the former New York Times editor was appointed, the magazine did say that his first column would be in March, on coverage of the election. So we're not ringing the alarm just yet. But he did, say our spies, submit an earlier column on Katie Couric, which would have been for the current issue. Pretty dated, and thin, we hear. "No one bothered checking to see if he could actually write a column and no one asked him for ideas before announcing his signing. He apparently didn't take too well to being edited."

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.

When pitched a story referencing Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, a journalistic classic, Lipman interrupted: "I don't know it, and I don't like it." That quote has now spread to Fortune, Portfolio's main rival, where her counterpart, Andy Serwer, has taken to using it as an ironic catchphrase, we hear, when he dings a story idea. When Lipman's tenure at Portfolio ends, it should be a consolation that one of her bon mots has made it into the culture.

[Photomanipulation by knsaber]

To be sure, Portfolio has flooded the newsstands in an effort to make an impact, which means many copies are pulped; and embattled editor Joanne Lipman eschewed eye-catching tricks such as, oh, putting a recognizable face on the cover; and the magazine is still new. But, says one magazine analyst: "30s would be decent for a launch. Portfolio is such a misfire — it's far from just a cover problem."

Conde Nast has poured way too much money and reputation into Portfolio ever to let it fail, and the magazine is still a good idea. S.I. Newhouse's most successful titles, such as Vanity Fair, have a largely female readership: a demographic reality that the Conde ad salesmen gloss over when selling to auto marketers and mens' apparel brands. Conde Nast still needs a flagship title for high-income men. (Here ends the boring magazine business background.)

So, what to do? Joanne Lipman has already been forced to give up the arty covers of Portfolio's first few issues, in favor of more topical imagery (January's had a picture of a corporate spy). But her bosses have to wonder whether Lipman, whose reputation was made by the fluffy weekend section of the Wall Street Journal, is the right person to make a must-read publication for top executives.

David Carey, publisher of Portfolio and now other titles, was the big winner in Conde Nast's executive purge this week. The one thing that would stymie his continued ascension at S.I. Newhouse's court: the failure of Portfolio. So here's a bet that, with his expanded authority, he finds a replacement for Lipman. Let's float one wild idea: Wired is now broadly in Carey's sphere of influence, so slide over the West Coast magazine's editor, Chris Anderson. Sure, he enjoys his current job; and he's a bit too geeky to produce wealth porn; but the former Economist writer would bring some badly-needed authority to Portfolio.

The Ron Paul Effect helps explain why Jeff Bercovici and Silicon Alley Insider both covered Fox's decision to uninvite Paul from the next GOP debate, and stuck Paul's name in their headlines (much like we did!). Duncan Hunter, similarly uninvited by Fox, got no such treatment.

Bercovici admitted the whole game to acting Gawker Managing Editor Nick Denton:

I wanted to write the item anyway but putting his name in the hed was definitely a traffic ploy. I tried to get "Julia Allison liveblogging" in there also, but it wouldn't fit.

(Ron Paul Ron Paul Ron Paul Ron Paul Ron Paul.)

Sorry, Ron Paul> Why Fox Should Limit Debate [Portfolio]
Fox Snub Boosts Ron Paul [Silicon Alley Insider]
Related: The Ron Paul Blog Bomb [Anti-Positivist]

Anna Wintour as You've Never Seen Her [Portfolio]