Magazines
Conde Nast closes Portfolio magazine
By Gene Ely
Apr 28, 2009 - 8:09:56 AM

It was the biggest launch of its time, certainly the most ambitious, and at the time many thought it came too late.

It is no more. Portfolio is dead.

Conde Nast today revealed that it is ending publication of the business monthly with the May issue.

“The pressures and realities of the continuous deep economic slump have lowered Portfolio’s revenue projections below what is needed to continue publication,” says Charles H. Townsend, president and CEO of Conde Nast, in a statement.

"Portfolio was an ambitious and innovative magazine and web site, and we were proud to publish them. The challenges facing this launch, however, proved too great."

The folding of the glossy monthly launched in 2007 hardly comes as a surprise in this harsh ad economy.

Magazine advertising took one of its worst hits ever in the first quarter of this year, falling 26 percent.

And Portfolio was one of the titles that suffered most. Ad pages for the quarter were down 60 percent compared to the year-earlier period, making it the worst hit of all business titles. The business/finance category was down 27 percent.

This marks the third magazine closure within the past year at Conde Nast, which also shuttered Domino and Golf for Women.

Portfolio.com, which underwent extensive layoffs late last year, will be shuttered sometime during second quarter.

Editor Joanne Lipman and publisher William Li are among the more than 80 employees reportedly losing their jobs. At its peak, the magazine employed 140, but many were axed last fall, when Condé Nast overhauled Portfolio.com and made cuts at other magazines as well.

Portfolio’s circulation was 449,005 according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations, which did not offer comparisons to the previous year because the title was so new. However, its circ numbers were at least 200,000 lower than the more-established business titles, including BusinessWeek, Forbes, Fortune and even Inc. and Fast Company.

To its credit, Portfolio was every bit the Conde Nast launch, done big with lots of big names and fat budgets for design and production.

It was also sold smartly to advertisers. Many months were spent out talking to media people, building support for the title and also addressing their concerns, which were very real.

The business category had never really come back from the ad slump of the earlier years of the decade, and the big three--BusinessWeek, Forbes and Fortune--were losing advertisers to the internet, along with readers.

How could Conde Nast survive where they were not?

The answer was a very smart, very expensive launch that would reignite reader interest in business news in a print format, drawn in by great writing and that Conde Nast sense of taste and style.

Portfolio delivered on that promise when it launched.

It was the smart magazine that was promised. The problem was that it just wasn't all that much smarter than all that had come before.

Critics were quick to take potshots. And even then people were saying it wouldn't make it.

In the end, Portfolio probably just came too late. Five years earlier, it might have worked, in the opinion of media people.