Why "Portfolio" Closed?

Conde Nast has been a very successful magazine publishing company for decades, and its Vanity Fair magazine has done extremely well since its relaunch 25 years ago.

But when it decided to launch a business oriented Vanity Fair called Conde Nast Portfolio, I had some doubts.

The magazine was well-written. But just as Vanity Fair often seems like an upscale People magazine, with a strong focus of inside Hollywood and inside Manhattan scandals, Conde Nast Portfolio seemed like it was primarily focused on hedge funds, Wall St. and the media world -- which left most of the business world.

For our clients, it was unpitchable. They didn't cover tech, for example. There was not way in, from our perspective. Nor would our clients be interested, really, in the readers of the magazine -- even though I was a subscriber.

In "Lessons learned from a closed "Portfolio,'" BtoBOnline quotes a disgruntled former editor, Jeffrey Chu, senior associate editor of Portfolio from early 2007 through last August, who said that when it came to pitch meetings -- the meetings in which reporters pitch stories they'd like to write -- "every thing could be a business story, but it had to be about rich people, hedge funds or finance...It was about rich people's toys. It was about dressing a diamond mining executive up in a fancy dress and making people look glamorous—but from worlds that kind of already were famous.”

The rest of the article looks at Portfolio as an advertising failure. But from my perspective, a business magazine that really doesn't cover business was the problem.

After all, people reading business magazines are not looking for scandals or glamour. What they want are either investment opportunities or management advice. Forbes provides the former; Fortune provides the latter; BusinessWeek provides news coverage with a smattering of the former and the latter.

But Conde Nast Portfolio provided neither. It often served up scandals among the wealthy, frequently those well known within Manhattan -- and the market for those stories and the people interested in them already have media outlets for that: Vanity Fair, the New York Observer and New York Magazine.

There wasn't room or interest in another option.

Broadcast Media Will Continue to See Significant Changes in 2009

Niche is the new normal, especially for broadcast. Due to the proliferation of social media sites, people are more likely to subscribe or search for news and information specifically targeting their interests. As Portfolio magazine says: “There's something for everyone, but nothing for everyone.” This will make it difficult for marketers to reach broad audiences, with only a few events each year – like the Super Bowl and the Academy Awards – that reach across demographics and interest groups. In fact, that’s why Birnbach Communications predict that Jan. 20th will be the single biggest media event this year – everyone will cover the Obama inauguration.

Increasingly, people will access TV shows with their computers as opposed to watching the shows when they air. For example, there were 1.4 million viewers of the Couric-Palin interview on YouTube and more than 4 million of the SNL skit – that’s the power of YouTube and Hulu.com. NY Times’ David Pogue already suggested consumers could save money by disconnecting cable, and logging onto the Internet instead to get network feeds and local news coverage.

Local cable/TV operators will have a bumpy road because of a significant double whammy: Both advertisers and viewers are fleeing. Local broadcasters will need to find a way to cut costs – which means more layoffs – while stemming the tide of departing viewers. One way may be to follow the lead of NBC, which realized that airing the new Jay Leno show five nights a week at 10pm is cheaper than airing five original 60-minute dramas (even with Jay’s $30 million salary). Local TV may find that whatever time they have can be best/inexpensively filled by talk shows.

Conde Nast Portfolio Claims "Facebook Creeps Me Out"

In its current issue, Conde Nast Portfolio ran an interesting article by Simon Dumenco, "Facebook Creeps Me Out." The reasons include ever-changing definition of privacy and the unserious nature of the site.

Here are two key points:

• Businesspeople often claim to use Facebook for vague “market research” purposes or to satisfy idle curiosity. But the social norms of social networking are still in flux, making privacy a real issue, says internet-marketing writer David Weinberger
• Facebook is simply unserious—particularly given how it prompts hard-driving business executives to regress into adolescent vernacular. “Poking” people, requesting “friends,” writing on someone’s “wall”: It’s cute when you’re in high school or college. But in a corporate environment, it sounds disingenuous and downright silly.

Poking, friending, even following and nudging are not serious business terms.

Conde Nast Portfolio Profiles "Last Media Tycoon" about the Washington Post

There may be a real market for taking a Vanity Fair magazine approach to journalism and applying it to business journalism.

If that sounds interesting to you, check out the current Conde Nast Portfolio, which includes two such articles. The first is "The Last Media Tycoon: Katharine Weymouth tells Condé Nast Portfolio how she plans to save the family's flagship brand and—she hopes—reinvent the industry,"which provides an profile of Weymouth and the challenges she faces.

There's an interesting chart from the article that highlights one particular challenge.

Weymouth seems to understand the industry's issues that have been discussed many times on this blog. Not sure about her solutions, but showing the influence of sister publication, Vanity Fair, the article also includes a number of photos of the attractive Weymouth in different outfits and a two-page spread of Weymouth with her attractive children.

I don't believe we'd see a similar spread of photos of a male executive in different, flattering attire or a photo of him with his kids.

The article still was interesting, but the photos were unnecessary. (I kept expecting that the captions would include fashion notes about the designers.) This is more about Conde Nast Portfolio than about Weymouth.

The other Vanity Fair-meets-business article was "Cold Case: Tom Carvel's ice cream empire churned up a substantial estate and a bitter, Dickensian fight over his money. Now a lawsuit asks, was he murdered?" It contains lots of smoking guns, claims of betrayals and fraud, but hard to figure out why it ran now -- when many of the elements have been going on for quite some time. Perhaps if Carvel had been more attractive (he wasn't), the article would have fit in better in the pages of Vanity Fair. The article was interesting, but it wasn't much of a business article.

New Pew Study Backs Up PRBackTalk's Position on Newspapers & Format Changes

Another interesting article about the sorry state of newspapers by the New York Times' Richard Perez-Pena, "As Papers Struggle, News Is Cut and the Focus Turns Local."

Findings of a new Pew Research Center survey include:

• 64% of newspapers have reduced foreign coverage.
• 10% of editors think foreign news is "very essential."
• 57% of papers reported a decline in the amount of space allocated to national news.
• One-third of papers are allocating less space for business news.
  
• Three/fifths of papers have less space for news overall.
• Large papers are reducing space given to business, arts, features and opinions -- topics that smaller papers generally don't give much space to in the first place.
• 85% of large papers have seen a decline in the size of their news staffs. Overall, there's been a 59% decline, which means smaller papers have been a bit more resilient.

Makes it a very difficult time for journalists and PR executives.

Also check out an interesting article in the July Conde Nast Portfolio, "The Romenesko Empire: How the first media gossip site inadvertently ushered in the era of fact-free journalism" by former top NY Times editor Howell Raines. Apparently, Romenesko is being supplanted by Gawker the same way traditional print media is being supplanted by blogs.

Andy Borowitz's "Next Month's Business News" -- One of the best features in Portfolio Magazine

The best way to describe Conde Nast's Portfolio magazine is to describe it as Vanity Fair meets Fortune.

In other words, it covers the glitz and glam areas of business: billionaire hedge fund managers (but not necessarily on the hedge fund business itself), fashion (a recent two-page spread looked at the value of the Chanel brand); Culture Inc. (a feature subtitled "Where art meets commerce") and publishing and media.

If you think publishing and media are the same because you didn't realize publishing meant book publishing, you're not in the magazine's target demographic.

And if you think media means something other than the big time traditional Allen & Co. Sun Valley Conference players, then you're not in its target demo. (If you're unfamiliar with the annual Allen & Co. Sun Valley Conference, check out its Wikipedia entry and pick up some other business magazine.)

However, there's one small section that I turn to each month -- it's Andy Borowitz's always funny "Next Month's Business News." This month's predictions of next month's business news includes several great items, including:

• "The Economy sux:(. In a sign of consumers' increasingly gloomy mood, the use of frowny-face emoticons in text messages will surge."

I also liked the one about the Verizon analyst call that "will be dropped for no apparent reason."

Only a few of his columns are available online, but check out a sample here.