Why can't magazines get the Web?

The news coming from Condé Nast gets bleaker. Most of the headlines, of course, have been about the humbling of pet-project print magazines like Men's Vogue and Portfolio, but the real story is the company's increasingly tortured relationship with the Internet.

This week, the company laid off more than three dozen online staffers from its CondéNet division, which oversees its popular "destination" Web sites like Epicurious.com and Style.com (as opposed to the online versions of the company's print magazines). This follows the decision two weeks ago to cut back the print version of Portfolio to 10 times a year, fire most of the staff of Portfolio.com, and curtail most of the site's original content.

According to one report, a Portfolio.com staffer who asked a company executive why the Web site was being penalized for the magazine's woes was told that Condé Nast is first and foremost a magazine company.

"Any rational person would say that's crazy," says a former Condé Nast editor who, like every former or current Condé Nast employee consulted for this article, insisted on anonymity. "To say that we're just a magazine company in this day and age is like saying that we're a buggy company."

What is behind Condé Nast's bellicose approach to the Web? Other traditional media outlets properly regard the Internet as both destroyer and savior and have gone into overdrive to translate themselves into online brands. By axing its online properties, Condé Nast is revealing its apparent online strategy: looking the other way while Jaws devours the back of your boat.

Condé Nast is certainly not the only publisher with a wary relationship with the net. There are very few examples of successful category-leading Web sites built around magazines. One notable exception is People.com, which says that it receives 8.6 million unique visitors and some 733 million page views a month. Those are large and impressive numbers, but compare the site to CNN.com (35 million page views daily, 276 million on Election Day alone) or ESPN.com (67 million page views each Monday night for its NFL content alone) and you begin to get a feel for magazines' relatively meager presence in the world of old media transformed online. Similarly, in a bid for survival and relevance, the nation's largest newspapers—the New York Times, Washington Post (parent company of The Big Money), Los Angeles Times, and USA Today—have all built extensive sites laden with video features and reporter blogs, which makes Condé Nast's latest string of decisions seem peculiar, even shocking.