The founders of Twitter are the 2009 "Media Person of the Year," according to IWantMedia.com. Their primary accomplishment: inspiring the Twitter song. Congrats, fellas!

Here is a plan to save newspapers, from the German publisher of the biggest daily paper in Europe: You can see links for free, but you pay for all the news content you read on the internet, either per-story or a flat subscription rate. Is not a bad idea! Now just put it into place and make it work before you go bankrupt. That's the trick.


This, then, is the only thing left of Conde Nast's $100 million investment in Portfolio: a repurposed Portfolio.com, with more news you can use, and an owner who "wants it to be a must-read site for small- and medium-size business owners." How declassé!


Last week the Chicago Sun-Times lost a sports columnist to the Chicago Tribune. This week, the Chicago Tribune lost a sports columnist to the Chicago Tribune. Next week, both papers will still be going broke, and all the Chicago sports teams will still be mediocre.

Portfolio was basically the starter pistol for Conde Nast's fall: a publication that would've been great with an online-only presence that instead screwed the pooch by disregarding their awesome online staff and instead trying to make a Tina Brown-modeled finance magazine with swagger. Examples of their miserable print presence? A Dov Charney cover story that was two years late. Lipman had the helm! But back to that in a moment.

Her theory—that Feminism isn't where it should be at this point—may very well might be right!

There're some great examples of places where sexism still exists, particularly in Hollywood and in some of the very, very misogynistic pop culture this country's turning out daily (forgetting what some of pop culture's women—Kate Gosselin being Public Enemy #1—have done onto themselves). I'd love to talk about gender politics—and yes, bring up the fact that there are no women on our masthead, too—but that's not nearly as interesting as simply assuming Lipman's idea to hold water, and referencing all other inquiries regarding this theory to another website, the first hour of Caryl Churchill's Top Girls, and then moving forward to drop jaws at Lipman's insanely massive, overwhelming ego put forth in an essay that could've been something far more substantial.

Where to start? How about right here:

So why have we stalled out?

Part of the reason can be traced to the aftermath of 9/11.

Everyone's life was reshaped by 9/11. Like many New Yorkers, I experienced that day in an intensely personal way: I was in the World Trade Center with a colleague when the first plane hit. And we were just outside the second tower, making our way through burning debris, hunks of airplane seats and far worse when the second plane came in directly over our heads.

I'll spare you the manner in which she tied that together, suffice to say it's got her quoting Graydon Carter about irony being dead, and then backtracking to say irony's still alive (which, as you'll later see, is very, very ironic), and that after 9/11, the conversation regarding women suffered greatly. Without providing any examples except for a Google search of an interviewer that turned up pictures of boobs. You can Google anyone's name and come up with pictures of boobs. Welcome to the internet, maybe this kind of know-how explains why Portfolio's web strategy sucked so badly. There's also this charmer:

As a freshman, I had an interview for a magazine internship in New York City. As I sat down, making sure to demurely close up my slit-front skirt over my knees, the interviewer barked, "If you want the job, you'll leave that open."

Scandalous! But is the blunt force of this *racy* anecdote really worth putting in the middle of an Op-Ed about how far women haven't come when you're trying to prove some, but not all progress past that? Surely, it belongs somewhere, but in this context, it just seems self-serving, as if Lipman's trying to say, Ladies, I've been there, and I got past it. Isn't the point that they've all been there, but more importantly, that they're still there? It's kind of absurd. Lipman also cites the way her career was described in an article as "leggy," which is (A) funny, (B) could be true in four different contexts outside of what she thinks of her actual legs and (C) is presented without any context whatsoever! We don't even know which article she's talking about, so how can we decide what the hell that means? Good thing The NYTpicker came in to regulate on this thing. Observe the smackalicious smackdown:

Here's what Steve Fishman actually wrote in New York Magazine last April:

S. I. Newhouse Jr., chairman of Condé Nast, falls in love with his editors. His romance with Joanne Lipman began over lunch at his U.N. Plaza apartment, with its beige carpets-no red wine allowed-and paintings by Warhol, de Kooning, Cézanne. Lipman, 47 years old, who'd spent her entire career at The Wall Street Journal, is a serious journalist with a serious mien, and long legs, which she likes to show off with short-skirted power suits. Lipman is "attractive," in Newhouse's vernacular-"He uses the word like others use the word spiritual," says a former editor. The two brainstormed at a small dining-room table. Newhouse, in his standard worn New Yorker sweatshirt, told her he had an idea for a business magazine. Newhouse didn't say much more; he rarely does. He asks questions. But Lipman excitedly filled in the details.

Anyone who thinks that sentence — or even that paragraph — sums up Lipman's career as "leggy" just can't read.

Touche! Lipman's essay is, among other things, disingenuous towards the discrimination she's "faced" in that regard alone. And unfortunately, she's writing for people who can read, but who often don't have the time to discern the smell of bullshit from the sound of the truth, especially because this is a newspaper, and they're supposed to be able to trust what's there (ha).

The Batman-like NYTpicker also notes that a few sentences later, Lipman preaches to the ladies:

"Don't be afraid to be a girl."

Ladies and grown-ass women, how much do you enjoy it when you're referred to as a "girl?" I know it's a little different than being a Jew making Jew-jokes, but still, I'm not sure it's something I could get away with. Why the double-standard, Jo?

Back to the failure of Portfolio. Remember this gem from Page Six?

EYEBROWS were raised last week when Portfolio editor Joanne Lipman - not known for her modesty - not only insisted on attending the World Economic Forum in Davos but demanded to fly to Switzerland first class. "It's just jaw-dropping," an insider said. "Not only is her magazine not profitable, but she just laid off almost the entire Web site and fired many others on the print side." Portfolio has cost Condé Nast more than $150 million, so far. But a company rep claims the trip was necessary: "All of our editors are continuing to cover and attend the events that are important and relevant to their magazines." But those who found Davos not relevant enough to make the trip included Morgan Stanley CEO John Mack, Google co-founder Sergey Brin, Chevron CEO David O'Reilly, Goldman Sachs head Lloyd Blankenfein, Sony chief Howard Stringer and Citigroup CEO Vikram Pandit.

Can we spell out the joke, here? The one way Lipman's completely wrong about men and women meeting in the middle is the example she set: that they both possess the capability to be equally as disgustingly vapid when it comes to the captain punching holes in their sinking ship. Both men and women, hand in hand, can disregard integrity for grossly incompetent, morale-shuttering selfishness!

It's like The MoDow School of Essayists is working on their class of 2009, and Lipman's first presentation is shoot-for-summa stuff. Even as someone who thinks everything Maureen Dowd writes smells like Julia Childs' Cote du Horeshit recipe, I can appreciate this. Except, Lipman's essay actually reads like a subversive "Portfoilio failed not because I was at the top, but because a woman was at the top in a still very male-dominated world" tome. Denial ain't just a river in Egypt, or the first step in the Kubler-Ross model. It's something well-insulated by angry gender bloodpolitik projection, or so Lipman would like to think. We're not the cavemen you'd like to paint us as, Joanne, and the women reading your bullshit aren't the Tarzan'd Janes you're telling them they are, either. If the system's gonna change, it's gonna have to start by dispatching with self-serving setbacks like you.

It's been a year since Radar folded, what the hey is Maer Roshan doing with himself these days? He is "working on some TV projects" out in LA, and going to the beach and working out, John Koblin reports. Wonderful!


Jonathan Lethem's new novel Chronic City is using the same cover photo that Portfolio used for its inaugural issue, the NYO points out. Meaning that the book will fade away, but not before Jonathan Lethem spends his entire $100 million budget.


I have come to the (late) conclusion that the New York Times Magazine, which gave us the immortal, meaningless phrase "The Way We Live Now," is America's Most Pretentious Magazine. Not bad, just pretentious. What do you say about that, NYT Mag editor Gerald Marzorati? "Does the Magazine have an ideology? At the risk of giving some of my colleagues hives, I think it does. Call it Urban Modern." Thanks, we might!


The new editor of the resurrected version of Vibe magazine will be Jermaine Hall, formerly editor in chief of the (now-dead) King magazine. Is there still room in the magazine industry for scantily clad women? Only time will tell.

Let's weigh the ups and downs:

BAD: No longer owned by fancy Conde Nast.
BUT: Now owned by American City Business Journals, producer of lots of actual business content!

BAD: No more Felix Salmon or Jeff Bercovici.
BUT: Is launching a new media blog by former Gawkerer Matt Haber, who got laid off by the New York Observer in its latest purge!

So it'll probably be much less lofty than Portfolio itself (which could be a good thing), but still bookmark-worthy. Zombies: sometimes they win!

Okay, GQ. Just take GQ instead. Wouldn't that have made more sense to give GQ in the first place? Anyhow we hope this works, cause if GQ goes down you're all getting Foreign Policy.

You can buy the cufflinks now for $100,000, but the bidding currently stands at $0. The seller is obviously a man of wealth and taste, and very possibly unemployed. Instead of reaping the windfall yourself, sir, consider donating them to be auctioned off at ASSME's upcoming Swag-A-Thon, a party of unemployed media types that will benefit even worse-off homeless AIDS patients.
Nobody wants those ugly cufflinks unless homeless AIDS patients will benefit. Seriously. [Ebay]The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.

Well maybe they'll do just that, John Koblin says!

American City Business Journals, which is operated by Condé Nast parent company Advance Publications, "has expressed real interest in taking it over," according to a source.

But the relaunch wouldn't come out of 4 Times Square: ACBJ is based in Charlotte, N.C.

Ha, no better way to highlight the stunning failure of your glossy nine-figure business magazine launch than to have it end up as a shadow of its former self staffed by commuters in a Charlotte office park! Urgh. But they do say that Portfolio.com's staff would remain in NYC, proving the website was always the most promising part of Portfolio and also proving, by extension, that the whole creation of the magazine was a bad idea.
[NYO. Pic via]

UPDATE: It's official: American City Business Journals is taking over Portfolio.com. No word on the move to NC, though.

Warren Buffett: "For most newspapers in the United states, we would not buy them at any price... They have the possibility of going to just unending losses." America's greatest investor, ladies and gentlemen.


According to a tipster, Wenner Media's Men's Journal laid off five people on Friday, and they were all women. COINCIDENCE? If you have any details, confirmations, or denials on this, email us.


The New York Times is expected to raise its price as early as this week: up to $2 on weekdays and Saturdays, and $6 on Sundays. The paper is working hard to drive off its uncommitted readers and get down to its "core audience" of a few thousand very rich people on the Upper East Side. Then you build from there, see.

Veteran WSJ reporter John Wilke died last Friday at the age of 54. In his obit, the paper says:

He mentored many younger reporters. At his desk, he often juggled two calls at once, and he furtively guarded his stories — until he believed them ready for publication — from the prying eyes of editors.

He wrote and rewrote the leads of his articles, sometimes dozens of times, until he was happy with the tone and content,and he nursed story ideas for weeks or months, cultivating a slight air of mystery, while gathering threads.

All things that, at today's WSJ, would probably get him canned.


Former Portfolio publisher William Li has landed a new job as associate publisher of Conde Nast Traveler. Good for him. In other interesting contractual news: Us Weekly editor Janice Min's two-year contract—estimated to be worth well over $2 million—is up this summer. Interesting to see how much less she gets this time around if she re-ups. Times are tough.

Run out and scoop up as many copies of this week's Newsweek as possible, because it's the last one in its old format before the redesign comes along later this month. Also Anna Quindlen is giving up her column there. I will notify my mom, the only person I can think of who still reads Newsweek.

Joanne, who never really got along with her staff, didn't go to the after-folding drinks with the riff-raff, but she is having her own mag death drinks at her place soon. But still not inviting the riff-raff! Hey, she's also been joking around. Check out these back-to-back zingers in an interview with Newsweek:

What two things would you do differently, if you had a second go at launching Portfolio?
Lipman: I can only give one-to launch in a better economy.

When did you realize that the closing was inevitable?
Lipman: That point never came.

Ha! When it comes to jokes, go big or go home, amirite? Anyhow she says she's planning a vacation, but I don't know why, since she apparently lives in quite a nice bubble already: "I don't read Gawker," she told Page Six."It's kind of like Twitter: a time suck and mostly useless."
It's true! She could add "although also run by a tyrannical leader, still in business."

The Condé Nast business magazine would have the inside dirt on Rupert Murdoch's man-eating wife Wendi. Infighting at Gucci. CIA informants inside American corporations. And maybe something servicey on private jets.

The Observer:

The make-believe stories were the perfect intersection of business with everything else, as Ms. Lipman liked to say. That is, business was never enough of a topic on its own for a story.

Imagining those stories is, of course, easier than delivering them. But it's not clear Lipman was particularly imaginative in the first place: The Observer's sources (like some others) blame the magazine's downfall in large part on the editor's lack of strong vision for the title, beyond "fancy Condé Nast business thing." (Lipman countered she was consistently aiming to be contrarian.)

At least she knew enough to reject titles like Liquid, Advance and The File. To bad all the other, more promising bits in the prototype, from the stories to the non-concept cover, were thrown out along with them.

The fear is palpable in Brown's Daily Beast column about Portfolio. If Condé Nast is giving up on a big project like Portfolio, she asks, how will it nurture visionary, money-losing editors like... well, like Tina Brown? Has Si Newhouse, steadfast chairman of the magazine group, and longtime Brown benefactor, lost his stamina — his manhood?

The fact that [Newhouse] elected to close [Portfolio]... suggests a worrying element of panic engulfing the steadfast publisher I worked for so comfortably for 17 years at Tatler, Vanity Fair, and The New Yorker...

Until now, he was always the media emperor who could live and do as he chose... Let's hope this pitiless economy doesn't force him to cap his noble career by performing a lobotomy.

The closure no doubt has Brown fretting over the $18 million her upstart Web venture the Daily Beast will cost Barry Diller's IAC through fall 2011. No worries, Tina: Diller still has the sort swagger old Si threw off in the early days of Portfolio. Though for good measure, you might to whisper for him your line about a money-losing publication being a mogul's "sexiest calling card." You know how much he loves being fabulous and sexy.

I worked at Portfolio for the first 17 issues of its 21 issue run, first as a fact checker and then as a staff writer. I was there for four months before the debut issue came out—four months characterized by sparse work and ample free food and beverage. After that issue came out, we sat around for another three months as we took the summer off, waiting to start our monthly publishing schedule in September 2007. Well, I'm sure market research, advertiser meetings and focus groups were all being conducted, and we had office supplies to order, but the vast majority of the nearly triple digit staff mostly sat around and waited for September.

I was a computer geek for several long years after college, and though I enjoyed it, it wasn't my calling. So I moved to New York and decided to become a journalist. (For anyone whose jaw drops at my insouciance here, may I remind you, journalism schools were quite laughable for much of this century, and many graduates of them still say their main value was to network and learn the business, not the craft.) After writing some freelance articles and getting a foot in the door at another Condé Nast magazine, I found my way to Portfolio.

Knowing little about the media world, I was suitably impressed with the pedigrees of everyone I worked with. Their resumes were dotted with long-term assignments from Time, The New Yorker, Fortune, The New York Times and other A-list publications. The most popular being the Wall Street Journal, the former home of editor-in-chief Joanne Lipman and much of her top staff. I never questioned why anyone would leave those places for something new. It's in a writer's ethos to create—who would choose to to keep cranking out story widgets at a dying gray broadsheet over the chance to sketch the lines of a new magazine funded by the glossiest media company in the world?

In the early days, there was a torrent of optimism in the still spacious halls of the 17th floor. But almost from the beginning, there were undercurrents of dissent. From what I knew of media, maybe from what I imagined of media, or saw in the movies, dissent was good, or at least not bad. It helped sharpen the premise and focus of an editorial product, helped those in charge of creating it to beta test it (to borrow a phrase) before it met public scrutiny. Would there ever be scrutiny. But if you have to say one thing about the failure of Lipman to create a successful magazine, it would be that dissent was not brooked by her. Not ever.

First, let me amplify, the magazine was a failure. It was not market conditions or the general economic meltdown that forced Si's hand, it was a failure to create something that people wanted to read. I harbor no personal ill will towards her or anyone I worked with, but Si's best editors-in-chief all have one thing in common, which is they know how to channel and predict the predilections of their readers and turn at least a couple issues a year into can't miss propositions. Lipman, a reporter from middle class suburban New Jersey, like me, who was savvy enough to climb to the top circle of the Wall Street Journal hierarchy, and did a good enough job there to be poached for millions by Si Newhouse, did not have this particular talent.

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.

When readers opened to the articles in Portfolio, they got a cruel shock. They got stories by the biggest names in the industry, but they got their leftovers. I ask you, if you were Michael Lewis (until his last, best piece for the mag before going to Vanity Fair) or Roger Lowenstein, would you submit your best stories to Portfolio, or to the much bigger and more important Times Magazine? Readers got some articles written by really good writers who could've become A-listers, had their articles not been edited within an inch of their lives and rewritten mercilessly, as if not by magazine editors but rewrite men at the New York Post City Desk. They got some articles chock full of good raw reporting that should've been re-worked into something readable by those same rewrite happy editors. And they got some utter crap, written by hacks that should've never been there to begin with.

As for me, like a lot of the younger writers there, I was never really able to do much damage, or earn much praise. There were easily half a dozen writers under 30 there whose role was to be seen and not heard. Despite our hustling and trying to curry favor with our editors, in the hopes they could sell us to Lipman, we were up against the faceless contract contributors for space, and we — especially me — usually lost that battle.

When I was laid off, I couldn't feel too bad about it right then, because the writing had been on the wall. I surely took the prize for the least output by a salaried staff writer, ever, due to a variety of faults, many my own, some not. (Well there were those legendary New Yorker writers who kept offices for decades after their one and only contribution to the magazine was published, but that's a different era.) But I did feel bad about the past. About watching scads of competent people get frustrated and leave, or get fired, about watching new people come in and quickly find they were expected to butt their heads against a brick wall all day for every original idea they hoped to contribute, and mostly about the promise that was completely unfulfilled thanks to the way the magazine was run. That day, when I polled some of the remaining staff, no one gave the place more than a year to live.

It was an insane idea to launch a print magazine in 2007, one so crazy it just might've worked. We were given everything we needed to succeed— late deadlines, a bottomless (well, maybe not) pile of cash, and a mandate to get the best people in the business on our team. A website that started out wobbly became relevant. Yes, the economy exploded, but Fortune launched in the Great Depression. The economy falling out should've been a new business magazine's Pearl Harbor, not its Waterloo.

It was a peculiar thing to run out the string at a magazine destined for the scrap heap, even if I ultimately got my release before it tanked, as did, of all the deserving people there, most of the ace website staff. It was at that point that I knew Portfolio would go down with Lipman at the helm. Her reign was as tumultuous as, I'm sad to say, Gawker made it sound. You need a certain insulation from things like Gawker, I think, to keep your eye on the ball, especially when we stumbled so badly so early. But Gawker's observation of the spectacle did not create it. I wonder, though, if hubris mixed with defiance may have led the company to prolong Lipman's reign, in hopes of vindication, far past the point of reason. Yet in too many ways to enumerate here, we did not operate in what I fondly call a reality-based environment. In Lipman's meetings, firings were never firings, stories were never bad or ill timed, mistakes were never made. The air had long been sucked out of that room, and few staffers seemed to believe anymore in the mission of the place, despite a collective desire, and I mean this, to do as good a job as they could do, given the circumstances.

Early in my time there, I saw a Deputy Editor I learned from and respected be run out on a rail for his insouciance, his belief that the magazine could be a great thing. I wondered, as those early undercurrents of dissent began to swell, why no one was pointing out the empress had no clothes. Wasn't this journalism, capital J? Didn't it matter when seasoned vets thought we were going about things in a haphazard, disjointed, unfocused and fundamentally wrong way? Yes, but. These were also jobs, capital J. And as is now clear, no one, inside or out, was ever going to save Lipman from herself.

And who knows, as her faltering became apparent, what kind of pressures Lipman faced from her boss, and his boss, and Newhouse himself, that further distorted the title? Essentially, it's hard to take principled stands when you work pretty much at the beneficence of a billionaire. And if you're wondering what's wrong with journalism these days, that's pretty much it.

Paul Smalera is a freelance writer at work on a book.

If you're a former Portfolio staffer and you'd like to give your take, we'll print it here. Just email me.

New figures for newspaper circulation over the past six months have been released, and "stop the presses" (tasteless and trite joke), they're bad. Overall daily circulation fell 7%, and Sunday circulation fell more than 5%. Both NYC tabloids, and papers in Houston, Miami, San Francisco, Atlanta, and Philly were the big losers. The WSJ was actually up a bit!


Jon Fine pulls out a 2004 interview with Conde Nast CEO Charles Townsend in which he hinted that now-dead Portfolio's total price tag might have been as high as $150 million. That's even more painful than everyone thought, if true.

David Carr talks to our archenemy Martha Stewart for his column this week, and Martha fails to say anything to stoke our ongoing feud. Disappointing. What are you scared of, Martha? Is it that we rule, while you drool? We anxiously await your response.


Sean Hannity still has not been waterboarded.

Con artists are marching around Colorado selling unsuspecting old people subscriptions to the nonexistent "new" version of the dead Rocky Mountain News. This is what happens when old people don't read media blogs frequently enough.

Just last week, Portolio's publisher was assuring media reporters that if they didn't think the magazine was doing well, they weren't looking at the big picture. Wrong. Portfolio's April issue was the smallest magazine Conde Nast had ever published. Conde's magazine division had a uniformly bad first quarter, and Portfolio was among the worst performers.

These sort of losses were once tolerated — see Vanity Fair and The New Yorker — in print journalism's Valhalla. Privately held, Newhouse Newspapers doesn't release its financial figures, but like every other newspaper publisher it must surely be suffering and now there are signs of a cash crunch at Conde. Company president David Carey finally acknowledged the direness of the situation: "I thought we had until the end of the year," Carey said, "but it was hard for us to imagine the shape of a recovery that would put us on the path" to meet ad page numbers. "The gap between where we are today and our expectations for 18 months was too large."

Conde Nast committed an estimated $100 million to launch Portfolio, which was a big deal.
It's highly likely we'll never see another glossy magazine launch of its size again. It was the last gasp of the "Spare No Expense" model. The magazine hired the best business writers in the country, and paid them huge salaries (for relatively little output). It aimed to be the New Yorker of business, and the plan—as far as you could tell—was to bust its way into the territory of Fortune, Forbes, and Businessweek through sheer glossiness.

It never really worked. Portfolio's editor, WSJ veteran Joanne Lipman, never inspired much love amongst her staffers. By the time the second issue came out, she'd already fired her second-in-command. Other disgruntled staffers started leaving soon after. Ad pages declined immediately after the launch, and kept on declining. Lipman's editorial judgment was questionable at best.

A year ago, it was perfectly clear that Portfolio was in trouble, and that Lipman was not doing a great job. Despite widespread speculation that she'd get canned, Conde Nast's overlord, Si Newhouse, supported her to the end.

Last October, the magazine laid off 20% of its staff and cut back to ten issues per year. That was the beginning of the end. Its terrible first quarter was the middle of the end. The question was always: how long was Si Newhouse willing to subsidize a huge, money-sucking magazine investment? Historically, Conde Nast been willing to do it for decades for prestige titles. But Portfolio was a terribly timed launch—especially in retrospect—and that, along with spotty execution, killed them.

Two years. That's what $100 million gets you these days. Portfolio had plenty of great writers, and its bloggers, like Jeff Bercovici and (the recently departed) Felix Salmon were worthwhile right up to the end. But Conde Nast, it seems, is not fucking around any more.

Bercovici reports that editor-in-chief Joanne Lipman got a call from Conde Nast chairman S.I. Newhouse this morning and then broke the news to her staff in a meeting. And in a bad sign about how Conde Nast is faring the recession, she said Newhouse cited "financial reasons at Advance," the Newhouse-owned parent company of the magazine publisher, as the reason for the closure.

Email us if you have additional info.

Time's cover story this week: "The New Frugality." Businessweek's cover story, 10/20/08: "The New Frugality." Hmmm.


On a panel last night, media beef-starter Michael Wolff said the following things: 80% of newspapers will be dead by the end of next year, TV networks will soon have minuscule audiences, Time Warner and all other media conglomerates will cease to exist in five years, and photographers are talentless hacks. We'll throw in one: Michael Wolff will be voted "Most Popular Guy in Media" in the next seventeen minutes.


Following a disastrous first quarter, the NYT Co's CFO says that "a good part" of the company's job cuts this year are "behind us," and severance cuts shouldn't be as bad as last year. Which, upon review, means very little.

The publisher of Portfolio explains that if you think the magazine is not doing well just because it lost half its advertising and cut back to ten issues, you're not looking at the big picture: "Versus our initial audit statement, total circ is up 19 percent and paid is up 43 percent. And the rate base is up 14 percent. Our success is not judged on ad pages. The questions we respond to are ‘Is the magazine relevant? Is it becoming a part of the culture? Are readers renewing?' That's what we're being judged on." If circ ever declines, look for Li to say they're being judged on good binding, glossiness of paper, and the mere existence of the magazine.


Former Conde Nast editorial director James Truman has taken a new gig consulting for a custom publisher, but his real passion is his magic circus company. Good for him, we say!

A finance blogger thinks that Esquire will fold before the end of next year. We don't think he's right, and his reasoning is incomplete, and we'd like to defend Esquire here, but then they have to go and issue an apology for telling guys to learn how to curse well by calling someone a "shit-sniffing faggot." Which is just not acceptable in 2009, unless you can sell advertising against it.


A true outrage at Newsweek—a tipster writes: "I work in the Newsweek building on 57th street. The bathroom on my floor has a noxious odor coming from it and despite multiple complaints to building management, we have been told that they will not address it because we will be moving...in over a month. The odor is a combination of sewage and gasoline.
The building has already changed the address so that mail does not arrive and does not seem concerned that we are working in a construction zone, which requires security guards to wear face masks; but this is unacceptable. We work for 9 hours a day, and to not be able to go to the bathroom is unheard of!" Hey just hold it in, we're in a recession!

It was clear at the end of last year that ad numbers were tanking across the board. Now, they're getting worse; the losses have nearly doubled, in some cases. These are only rate base figures that may not exactly reflect specific sales figures, but they give a clear enough picture of the direction these magazines' finances are going. The company lost $200 million in Q1, compared to last year.

Notable: The weak performance of Portfolio; the fact that Bon Appetit is doing better than Gourmet, (very) relatively speaking; the continued alarming decline of the New Yorker; and the even more alarming decline of Wired, which you voted to save at all costs. The full list is below. [Title/ '09/ '08/ % Change]

One might call Lipman's tastes erratic. The business magazine editor, said to find business journalism uninteresting, is known around the office for spiking piles and piles of copy, enough even to prompt comparisons to Tina Brown in her fussy Condé Nast heyday.

From the outside, Lipman's impulsiveness is apparent in her curious cover choices. After the outbreak of the worst economic crisis in 70 years, she put a picture of clothier Dov Charney on the front of Portfolio. Next month, amid talk of bank nationalization and CEO immolation, the magazine's cover will feature Sarah Palin.

From inside the publication comes a tragic story involving a cover that never was: Barack Obama, shot by photo legend Annie Leibovitz at Lipman's behest, for the December-January cover. Worried that everyone else would put the president-elect on the cover, Lipman is said to have killed the portrait after it was taken.

So instead of what was believed to be exclusive work from star photographer Leibovitz, of the newly-elected president, timed exquisitely to front-run the inaugural buzz, Portfolio ended up with a concept image of a dead bull on Wall Street; clever, but severely tardy for a meltdown that shifted into overdrive nearly a full financial quarter earlier.

"Clever, but severely tardy" could also be used to summarize much of what has ended up inside the magazine — and to describe whatever Condé Nast chairman Si Newhouse will inevitably have to have done to Portfolio in Lipman's wake.

That's easily Lipman's worst call since fronting with American Apparel founder Dov Charney in the first Portfolio following the economic meltdown — greeting the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression with a story about a t-shirt vendor.

Staff tried to warn Lipman about the Palin cover, according to Women's Wear Daily, just as they did before she disastrously published stale scuttlebutt about a Nixon-era scandal last January. Lipman, defiantly ignorant of business news, was no more compliant this time around.

As with November's Charney issue, April's Portfolio will ignore an historic fulcrum in American finance, when anti-Wall Street populism is at an all-time high and calls for wholesale bank nationalization are gaining real ground (establishment figures like former IMF man Stephen Johnson having come to concur with once-fringe economists like Nouriel Roubini).

Sure, famed Nixon campaign-chronicler Joe McGinniss is penning the Palin piece, and there's some sort of vague business angle involving oil, but come on: Even Lipman's heretofore steadfast boss Si Newhouse has to be able to see how out of touch his business magazine now looks. Even if the glamour-mag publisher wasn't much concerned with finance six months ago, the imploding advertising market ensures he's up to speed now. And he'll be wondering why Lipman isn't.