It’s hard to underestimate the confusion that afflicts journalists when their journeys take them to any place where wealth intersects with politics. Even otherwise sharp writers can find themselves befuddled. A typical response is to retreat into a storied morality tale in which the “workers” or some small business—typically, a business that makes things the smart-set likes—fights against bigger businesses attempts to warp the political machinery in their favor.
A great demonstration of this befuddlement and retreat to orthodoxy can be seen in the latest issue of Portfolio. And don’t worry, we’re not going to write another three-thousand word dissection of the entire magazine. We’ve decided that even Portfolio deserves a chance to grow into its potential. So we’ll wait at least until the next issue before doing that again. (Probably.)
In “Chocolate Wars,” writer Alexandra Wolfe—the daughter of author Tom Wolfe—tells the tale of a struggle between the mass producers of chocolate—think Hershey or Nestle—and boutique makers of higher-quality chocolate. It’s a fine enough story, certainly worth telling. In fact, it was the first thing we read when the new issue came out. And Wolfe is a more than capable writer, drawing the lines of battle and the reasons for it quite well. But it’s also quite obvious that she never gets beyond the orthodox morality tale to see what’s really happening.
[Things get messy after the jump.]

Read more »

Someone needs to explain to Portfolio that the “quality, not quantity” mantra doesn’t exactly apply to ad pages. The second issue of Portfolio has 122 ad pages, down from 185 in the premier/premiere issue. Something tells us the special double fold-out, pop-up, insert-add-on nature of those 122 pages in the second issue aren’t going to make up for the loss of 63 ad pages.
The glacial progression of the second issue has ceased, and the mag will hit newsstands on August 15 to much rejoicing.
Portfolio’s Second Issue Wraps With 122 Ad Pages As Deputy Editor Fired [Folio va Gawker]

This editor’s for hire…
Trouble with the little $125 million launch that could, from the New York Observer:

This morning, Portfolio editor Joanne Lipman fired deputy editor Jim Impoco, according to a staffer. Mr. Impoco, former editor of the New York Times business section, was responsible for bringing in top talent to the Conde Nast business magazine (or is it a women’s magazine?)—which just closed issue number two—and it’s a big loss for the Conde Nast start-up. A Portfolio spokesperson said: “Jim Impoco left the magazine and we wish him well.” The spokesperson would not confirm that he was fired.

Issue #2, we’re still waiting…
Deputy Editor Fired From Portfolio [New York Observer]

How is that $100+mm magazine launch doing? You remember, the magazine that will print stories that are way over-covered in the first place but create novelty in having celebrities like Tom Wolfe write reductionist generalizations in flowery prose. Maybe that golden cityscape on the first cover of Conde Nast Portfolio was pyrite after all. Gawker has released some Portfolio sales figures received from an insider and although it may be too early to tell, Gawker reports that industry insiders are saying Portfolio kind of bombed at newsstands, considering the financial muscle used to peddle it.
Portfolio’s goal is to sell 200k copies at newsstands this year. So far Portfolio has sold 30k copies in 23 full days of release (although only 15 days of national release, but a.) who outside of NY buys the magazine and b.) this probably slightly balances out sales inflation caused by the marketing push at the magazine’s launch), which amounts to roughly 1.3k copies sold per day. If portfolio maintains this rate, it will sell over 300k copies by the end of the year, well ahead of expectations. At a cover price of $4.99, that $1.7mm in revenue from newsstand sales (and a rather nauseating 1% recoup of startup costs). The problem is – it is extremely doubtful that Portfolio will continue to sell 1.3k copies a day. Taking a hypothetical – if the current daily sales number halves for the rest of the year (or cools way off before August), the magazine will sell slightly over 180k copies.
The next issue of the magazine doesn’t come out until August, and then normalizes into a monthly publication. It’s unlikely that many new people will discover Portfolio’s age-old (“Exchangeable Currency vs. the Barter System” by Dana Vachon) content who haven’t already stopped to watch the potential Conde Nast car-wreck. In other words, that huge launch boost to carry the magazine through August didn’t happen.
Is ‘Portfolio’ Selling Like Its Hype? [Gawker]

Other than looking a little confused when holding up the premiere premier first issue, Jon Stewart’s interview with Matt Cooper about his Valerie Plame piece in Portfolio aired Monday without any discussion of the mag. This, despite Cooper’s insistence that he was entirely focused on promoting Portfolio. Here’s a quote from Cooper in the Portfolio blog:

I still haven’t seen the show. I’ve been on the road promoting Portfolio in Atlanta and now on to Minneapolis and haven’t had Comedy Central in my hotel rooms. But I’ll be curious what it looked like.
The interview was good. Jon is tough on the press as everyone who watches the show knows so I found myself defending a profession that I think he rightly critiques most nights but kept trying to bring it back to the mag because, hey, that’s what I was there to promote.

By “bring it back to the mag” Cooper meant not talking about the mag at all. Papa Nast cannot be happy – it’s one chance to develop some street-cred with the “younger than Tom Wolfe” generation was squandered.
Does it sadden anyone that the Daily Show is reaching for guests in the depths of Portfolio? I don’t know whether that speaks more to Daily Show guest bookings or Portfolio’s insta-“prestige.” At least it’s a bit amusing that Portfolio needs to be referred to as “Conde Nast” Portfolio just to seem legit. You need to pump at least $125mm into your magazine launch for branding.
Daily Show Interview with Matt Cooper
Behind the Scenes at Daily Show – [Portfolio]

[WARNING: If you're part of the 93% of DealBreaker's readership that cares nothing about business media because you don't work in media, read no further. This will probably make your eyes bleed.]
If the premiere issue is any indication, Conde Nast Portfolio** will be the Paris Hilton of business magazines: pretty but vapid, and unlikely to produce anything resembling an original thought.***
If you’re throwing darts at a newsstand, you’re probably as likely to hit something worse as something better. By all magazine standards, it’s slightly above average.**** But it’s painfully bad for a magazine that has poured $125 million and 18 months of work into development. (We’re no strangers to painfully bad, you understand, but Dealbreaker costs less than a Deb Schoeneman contributing editor contract to produce and it’s done entirely on the fly. What’s their excuse?)
[Below: A Portfolio staff meeting. As we imagine it.]

We took an hour yesterday and read the thing cover-to-cover. At 300+ pages, you’d think it would take more than an hour, but you would think wrong. A ton of ad pages (advantage Portfolio) and a few acres of graphics and photos to compensate for a lack of new and interesting information (disadvantage Portfolio) reduce the amount of actual text to a manageable 60 or so pages of feature content and like most large magazines, front-of-the-book doesn’t start till page 97. Among the pages: a big story by Tom Wolfe on hedge funds. We’d note the other potentially exciting features, but that’s pretty much it. Our take:
THE COVER:
First, a word about the cover: Only a company as fat and complacent as Conde Nast would be arrogant enough to launch a new business magazine with a cover that gives the reader no idea that it’s a business magazine. There are two possibilities here. (1) Portfolio thinks that newsstand readers will look closely enough to see the subtitle “business intelligence” just below the title, despite all available research indicating that they generally don’t read anything in fonts smaller than GIGANTIC, or (2) Portfolio imagines everyone everywhere already knows what they are because they’ve gotten quite a bit of media trade press and people who work in media tend to think that everyone everywhere pays attention to media news when, in fact, they don’t. (Other things most print media consumers don’t pay attention to: bylines. But more on that later.) We know Conde Nast does cover testing for some of their magazines—Vogue, Vanity Fair, etc. We can only assume the $15,000 or so it would have cost to do that for the “Premier” issue was used to pay people to pick lint from Tom Wolfe’s trademark white suit. Or maybe to pay for the first 15 words of his piece, which are as follows: “Not bam bam bam bam bam bam but bama bampa barama bam bamity bam bam…” (Here Wolfe exhibits the typical mentality of a Conde Nast freelancer who is paid by the word: why not insert a few extra bams?)

Read more »