Come next April, Conde Nast will roll out its new business monthly, Portfolio, and that's got the Big Three business titles in an early lather, fearing the new title will skim off yet more ad pages in an already depressed category.

Yesterday, Fortune's Eric Pooley got pushed aside as that magazine's managing editor, in what's likely the first of a slew to personnel shuffles among the business magazines heading toward April.

Pooley, axed abruptly yesterday by Time Inc. editorial chief John Huey, is being replaced by Andy Serwer, another longtime Time Inker. Pooley will move upstairs to undertake investigative projects, according to Time Inc.

Serwer was chosen by Huey foremost for a shared vision for Fortune but also for his media experience beyond print, as a contributor to CNNMoney.com and the cable network as well. Serwer, who is 47, sees himself as multiplatform guy, and one of his aims is to build the Fortune brand beyond the printed magazine.

Pooley, a respected Time Inc. journalist, had held his title only 18 months, but in that time he proved the wrong person for the job, lacking leadership skills, which led to the departure of key staffers, but also any deep sense of business and where business journalism was headed. Pooley had written for Time for years when he was picked by Huey to lead Fortune but was new to business reporting.

Through Pooley's brief tenure as Fortune ME, ad pages continued to fall. Through September Fortune ad pages were down 5.6 percent, to 1,965. Overall, business titles were down 1.5 percent. BusinessWeek was down 1.7 percent and Forbes was up 2.9 percent, according to the Publishers Information Bureau.

But as much as anything, Pooley was a victim of the internet, a traditional sleeves-up Time Inc. editor who saw his job as moving copy at a time when business news was moving at lightning speed onto the web, and taking advertisers with it.

Both Business Week and Fortune were far slower than Forbes in developing their web presences, cutting back during the ad recession when Forbes was building up Forbes.com, and that has left both playing a game of catchup, and a late one at that.

Stephen J. Adler was hired two years ago as editor of Business Week, lured away from The Wall Street Journal, and his mandate was to beef up that magazine's online presence. But it's been a slow go. The magazine continues to be in turmoil following a string of staff cuts.

Back in January, CNNMoney.com was relaunched as a super site for Time Warner business news, including Fortune, Money, Fortune Small Business and Business 2.0, and as of June that site ranked No. 4 among top business news sites, ahead of Forbes.com at No. 7 and No. 10. But Fortune's share of CNNMoney.com traffic is presumably a fraction of the total, leaving it still well behind Forbes.com. 

The arrival of Portfolio will make the race of online readers all that more intense. While Conde Nast is saying little about the title, it is expected to offer a strong online component and an emphasis on news under Joanne Lippman, also a former top Wall Street Journal editor.