Conde Nast’s Portfolio collapses

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From the get-go the media seemed more intrigued about what was going inside Portfolio than readers did with what was being published in the magazine.

Conde’ Nast’s glossy business monthly began with 185 ads in a 332-page issue, and was widely promoted as the last, great magazine launch the world was ever likely to see. It didn’t see it for long. Just two years later Portfolio is dead, a casualty of a weak economy, a rapidly deteriorating magazine industry and ultimately a failure to define itself both inside its own publishing house and to the world at large.

When the magazine made its debut in April 2007, publisher David Carey gushed to the New York Times that ‘we’re not giving you peas and carrots, we want to capture the glamour.’ Editor Joanne Lipman wrote in her first editor’s letter that business was about power and guts -- and business coverage should be gutsy, too.

The magazine built up a roster of star writers and big-name editors with a huge payroll to go with the weighty masthead. And Portfolio took up the mantle of the kind of deeply reported, exactingly edited narrative stories about business that used to be the hallmark of front-page stories of the Wall Street Journal before Rupert Murdoch turned it into an Anglo version of the Financial Times.

But Despite Conde’ Nast’s legendary deep pockets and lavish spending habits, Portfolio failed to catch on with advertisers and readers. As a monthly, it struggled to make a name for itself as an outlet for hard business news, and its website, which was supposed to provide that part of the equation, laid off much of its staff late last year.

Lipman generated a stream of tough coverage about herself. A hard-charging personality who played a key role in the launch of the Wall Street Journal’s successful Weekend section, she found herself under constant scrutiny from the media rubberneckers at Gawker.com, the New York Post, and the New York Observer.

Internally, sister Conde’ Nast publications hardly rolled out the welcome wagon for Portfolio. Vanity Fair went after writers Portfolio was targeting and even poached one of its big gets, Michael Lewis, away from the start-up.

Ultimately, though, Portfolio seemed an idea more in sync with the 1980s and ‘90s than the comeuppance coming due in the mid-2000s. In what turned out to be unfortunate timing, the magazine centered upon the big score in the financial world and the outsized egos who play in it was launched six months before the Dow peaked in October 2007. Even its title suggested an era of expansion and confidence rather than one of moderation and lower expectations that prevails.

There is little glamour in business to capture. We’re back to eating peas and carrots.

-- Joe Flint