Si Newhouse

Two months after Lehman Brothers crashed, and one month after its puzzling Dov Charney cover, Portfolio has finally addressed the financial crisis.

Michael Lewis gets the cover story, and, defying the magazine's recent tradition, the lead image isn't a person. Portfolio's cover is an image of Wall Street's Charging Bull statue, flipped sideways lying under a cover line, "After the Fall."

In the time since the magazine's November release, Portfolio has been confronting a crisis of its own. The magazine has all but killed its Web site, it laid off 20 percent of its staff, the majority of its staff writers were laid off (with some getting an option to sign a contract), it was in serious danger of folding and it's publishing schedule has been downsized from 12 times a year to 10 times a year.

And apparently that has taken effect immediately: this month's issue is the publication's December/January issue. And, finally, the author of its cover piece, Mr. Lewis, has handed in his last assignment and now he's headed upstairs at 4 Times Square to Vanity Fair.  read more »

Early last week, the survival of several Condé Nast titles was in doubt.

According to sources familiar with the situation, when Condé Nast executives walked into a weekly meeting last Monday, October 27th at their headquarters at 4 Times Square, it was not clear whether chairman Si Newhouse and C.E.O. Chuck Townsend would decide to scale back several titles, or to fold them entirely.

Two magazines, Portfolio and Men’s Vogue, were specifically in trouble. Both magazines are newer titles for the company—18-months- and 3-years-old respectively—and have had difficulty drawing instant results, particularly in an ad climate that Condé Nast executive director Tom Wallace told the Portfolio staff later was the worst he had ever seen.  read more »

As John Koblin reported yesterday, Condé Nast is implementing across the board budget cuts. Men's Vogue was forced to reformat itself down to a glorified supplement to its big sister publication; Portfolio is dramatically scaling back its Web site and limiting its run from 12 issues a year to 10.

Like the natty yet faceless figure in the opening credits to Mad Men, Condé Nast editors could be forgiven for feeling like their world is collapsing around them and their lives—not to mention their lifestyles—are in a state of free-fall.   read more »

And bad news continues to leak out of 4 Times Square.

Media Mob has learned that Portfolio is cutting roughly 20 percent of its staff, and the monthly will now publish only 10 times a year.

Portfolio.com, the stand-alone Web site that has been unique for its original content and its large staff, will be severely scaled back; the Web site and whichever remaining staffers it has will merge with other Condé Nast Web properties. The ad sales work for the Web site will be done by Wired Digital.

Joanne Lipman will remain the editor in chief of the magazine.

David Carey, a group president at Condé Nast who oversees Portfolio, said that the 18-month-old magazine was launched "when we were expecting a much more robust ad climate.  read more »

A Condé Nast spokeswoman writes in an e-mail, "Men's Vogue will be absorbed into Vogue and published in the spring and fall, it was announced today by Charles H. Townsend, President and C.E.O of Condé Nast Publications. It will continue to be edited by Jay Fielden."

Earlier today, we reported that Condé Nast execs have been figuring out what to do with Men's Vogue at a time when the entire company is going through cutbacks. They were considering folding it, but decided to eliminate its staff and reduce its publishing schedule from 10 issues a year to two issues a year.

A source at Condé Nast said the only reason it exists in any form is "nothing more than for Anna to save face."

Call it the Five Percent Plan.

The Observer has learned that all Condé Nast publishers and editors have been told they have to cut their staffs by 5 percent and their budgets by 5 percent within weeks, according to five Condé Nast sources.

It will affect every title, including the company's most successful: The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Wired, Glamour and down the line.

The plan is not just a 5 percent overall spending reduction but rather two distinct 5 percent cuts for each title, guaranteeing that titles cannot meet the goal without cutting staff.

First, each book will have to cut 5 percent of its payroll.  read more »

In addition to announcing a hiring chill, Condé Nast C.E.O. Chuck Townsend has informed his publishers that their annual retreat will not be in Florida ths year as originally planned; it'll be in New York instead.

WWD reports:

This year’s meeting was scheduled to be at the Ocean Reef Club in Key Largo, Fla. According to one insider, executives were sent a save the date about the Florida meeting in July.

On Tuesday morning, Condé Nast top brass mentioned to executives that the meeting would be moved, and by Friday morning, an events staffer sent a short e-mail to publishers informing them the meeting will be held Jan. 26 and 27 in New York, with a dinner to be held on the 26th.

Also: Hearst canceled its Christmas party.

At a moment when the market is crashing and we're still trying to make sense of why the Dow goes up 900 points one day and down 700 another, when The Washington Post, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal cover the crisis on their front pages daily, and a once-in-a-lifetime story lands in your lap, is there a monthly magazine better positioned than Portfolio to break this story down?

The Condé Nast business magazine has been publishing for 18 months, and those rocky staffing issues have—for the most part—been put to bed.

So, now it's game time! Lehman Brothers went down a month ago, the story hasn't stopped for a second, and there has been plenty of time to flood the zone.  read more »

Condé Nast CEO Chuck Townsend informed a group of his publishers yesterday morning that if their magazines can avoid hiring someone, they should.

"If you have an open position on your team, they're going to make you stand on your head until you're blue in the face before you fill it," said one attendee at the meeting.

Mr. Townsend gathered publishers for a quarterly breakfast meeting on the fourth floor at 4 Times Square. It lasted from 7:30 a.m. to 9:30 a.m. Scrambled eggs, potatoes and fruit were served.

The language from Mr. Townsend wasn't entirely clear, but with more bad news released yesterday about ad revenues in the industry, Mr. Townsend and Si Newhouse have notified the publishers of each Condé Nast book to say that it's time to reevaluate things on both the editorial and business sides before swinging into 2009.

It's not quite a hiring freeze! It's a hiring chill of sorts.

"My interpretation of it is that it's not cast in stone or that the doors are locked," said the source. "But it's a request that however you're running your business now, you should continue to do that for the foreseeable future."

Last night, Charlie Rose welcomed Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter to his PBS talk show to talk about his magazine's 25th anniversary issue and companion book.

After an extremely enthusiastic introduction (inside voice, please, Charlie!), the two cover a lot of ground from the journalism to art and photography to documentaries to his new baby to what movie is Condé Nast chairman Si Newhouse's all time favorite. (Is it D.O.A. or The Searchers?)

A self-deprecating Mr. Carter told Mr. Rose that he lacks a "core competence" and that his greatest accomplishment has been keeping his job at the magazine for the last sixteen and half years. He also hints at writing some sort of memoir one day.

What is happening to newspapers in New Jersey over the last few months? The New York Times has emptied out its Newark and Trenton bureaus; The Bergen Record, as former senator Bob Torricelli likes to remind us, is shutting down its Hackensack headquarters. The Newhouses announced The Star-Ledger has to cut 200 bodies, or it will sell the paper (or maybe it'll just do it anyway--JP Morgan has been brought on as a consultant for the sale).

In any event, here's the memo that Star-Ledger publisher George Arwady sent to the newsroom this morning. Sometimes publishers hedge the doomsday stuff. Mr. Arwady not so much.  read more »

The Star-Ledger announced today that 200 non-unionized employees will have to take a buyout by Oct. 1. If the total is not met, the Newhouses' Advance Publications is threatening to sell the newspaper. Reporters are not unionized, according to a source close to the paper.

"There are quite a few reporters—some who have been there their whole career—who will be gone by Oct. 1," said the source. "Most of them weren't planning on leaving until this morning."

Prior to this morning, it had been a typically strong week for the paper. Since July 20, The Star-Ledger has been rolling out a hard-hitting investigative series that examined the shady financing practices of the Rutgers University Athletic Department.  read more »

Earlier today, Media Mob looked at Richard Pérez-Peña's New York Times Sunday Business article about Condé Nast chairman Si Newhouse.

In that article, Mr. Pérez-Peña noted:

Last year, Condé introduced one of its most expensive new titles, Portfolio, its first business magazine, which company executives predict will lose $150 million or more before breaking even in four to five years.

The price tag for Porfolio just keeps going up, apparently. In April 2007, New York Magazine's Mark Fass wrote, that the magazine had "a reported budget of $125 million, it’s the most expensive launch Condé Nast has ever done."

Previously, the quote had been $100 million.  read more »

The most interesting thing in Richard Perez-Pena's 3,330 word write-around profile of Si Newhouse is the language from Condé Nast executives about the importance of the Web.

• Tom Wallace, editorial director, Condé Nast: “You’re going to have to go a long way on the Internet to compete with the way we produce words and images in the magazines."
• Steve Newhouse, chariman of Advance.net: “What we’re not doing is trying to turn those companion sites into large Web destinations. They’re there to support the magazines.”
• Jonathan Newhouse, head of Condé Nast international: “I think sometimes commentators throw around these assumptions about what is happening to the industry, going the way of newspapers, and I don’t believe it.
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A little after 6 p.m. at the Frederick P. Rose Hall, Condé Nast president Richard Beckman was sharing a drink—vodka, olives—with Condé Nast CEO Chuck Townsend. The two were discussing the same thing everyone in the lobby of Jazz at Lincoln Center at the Time Warner Center was talking about: What the National Magazine Awards can do, or not do, for a magazine.  read more »

It's on the record now.

Condé Nast editorial director Tom Wallace gave the company's loudest and most forceful public support for Joanne Lipman, the editor of Portfolio. In a story in today's Women's Wear Daily written by Stephanie Smith, Wallace says the following: that the company "love[s]" Joanne Lipman; that she's an "ingenious" editor; that she's absolutely safe in her job; that the company is "extremely pleased" with the magazine.  read more »

Freelance Fizzle!  read more »

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Si Newhouse's plan for a new skyscraper on the far West Side with Douglas Durst is dead in the water, but is there something else out there?

Conde Nast C.O.O. John Bellando sent out an internal email this morning reassuring employees that all hope isn't lost. At least for a new skyscraper somewhere. Here's the memo:  read more »

So that new skyscraper that Si Newhouse was hoping for? It appears dead.  read more »

Last night, at Columbia's journalism school, Joanne Lipman said that three years ago she got a call from Si Newhouse. She met with him, had lunch, and loved the conversation so much she would have been perfectly satisfied with her life even if she'd been struck by a truck on her way out the door of his apartment building.  read more »

Looks like the biggest Manhattan real estate battle in years is shaping up to be the biggest media battle too.

As The Observer reported today, Rupert Murdoch has joined up with the real estate heavyweight The Related Companies, according to a source, in its bid for the Hudson Yards project on the far West Side of Manhattan. If the Related Companies wins the billion-dollar-plus bid, it would have the right to develop on land currently owned by the Metropolitan Transit Authority, and Mr. Murdoch's News Corporation would move its offices from 1211 Avenue of the Americas to an area in the West 30s along 11th Avenue.

Meanwhile, Conde Nast chief S.I. Newhouse is prepared to flee 4 Times Square for a new office tower in Hudson Yards as well...  read more »

It's hard to evaluate the news coming from Keith Kelly's Media Ink column in The New York Post about Conde Nast chief Si Newhouse's Wednesday meeting with Joanne Lipman, editrix of Portfolio.

The splashy $100 million project is the object of some Schadenfreude, though the Schaden-part has always been difficult to pin down.  read more »

Condé Nast's bulky Portfolio makes a lightweight debut.  read more »

Just weeks ago, Portfolio staffers could only communicate under double super secret background (Matt Cooper, natch).

But as this weekend's storm reached Biblical proportions in New York City--Genesis? Yikes!--came the first glimmer of Portfolio.com.

And now with today's print launch, the Conde Nast, no-talking-in-the-cafeteria gag order has been briefly lifted, letting in a gaggle of media reporters: Kit, Irin, Friedman, and Keith Kelly. Dylan is around, too, but only as a talking head for ABC News.

All this and there's not even a glitzy launch party to reward hard-working media reporters. Instead, the Portfolio gang will toast one another tonight at the Beaver Bar.