There was a tremendous amount of coverage today of the announcement that Conde Nast would soon be shuttering its Portfolio magazine.
In fact, Portfolio had not received this much ink since the news two years ago that Conde Nast planned to make a nine-figure investment in the launch of a new print product, a decision that seemed audacious, even at the time.
Others closer to the magazine business have shared their thoughts on why Portfolio failed, so I won't dwell on that part of the story. Here are a few of those comments:
Jim Ledbetter at the Big Money, who knows a thing or two about launching a financial content product during a down market, suggests that with a smaller budget, a weekly frequency, a better website and a better editor, Portfolio might have been able to survive, had market conditions been better.
But I look at the Portfolio shutdown simply from the standpoint of a reader. I don't read a lot of magazines; in fact, Portfolio is the only consumer magazine to which I currently subscribe. I get most of my news from the web, either on my desktop or iPhone and most printed publications just seem stale by the time I read them (yes, that even applies to the New York Times I read on the subway each morning). So I certainly did not look to Portfolio for breaking news. But sometimes, you want the long form story, the kind you can get from The Economist, the New Yorker, Vanity Fair and, yes, Portfolio.
I viewed Portfolio simply as pleasure reading. During its first summer, I found it to be the perfect poolside reading material. During the summer of 2007, when ad dollars were still plentiful, Portfolio had "plop value" that could compare to the weighty fashion magazines my wife would read. Portfolio hired talented writers and delivered solid investigative reporting. While many skewered Portfolio for putting Sarah Palin on the cover of its April issue, I found the Joe McGinniss article, which described how Palin's dealings with the oil companies would ensure that the $40 Billion natural gas pipeline would never be built, to be top notch.
And, of course, Portfolio hired a terrific team of bloggers, led by Felix Salmon, now at Reuters. While the print product was always more of a guilty pleasure, Felix's Market Movers blog was on my daily "must read" list.
I'm not a magazine reader and if I were to start up a new content business today, it wouldn't be in print and it wouldn't have a $100M launch (or a $10M or probably even a $1M launch). But, this summer, when I'm lounging by the pool, I'm going to miss Conde Nast Portfolio.
