Could Portfolio Have Survived?

Last fall, I was on panel with a Portfolio writer who made a cutting remark about the vulnerability, in the age of Wall Street's evaporation, of new business publications such as the one you're reading. I challenged him to a bet: I'd wager $100 that TBM would outlast the print version of Portfolio. He declined to take the bet, which tells you just about everything you need to know about the sad, incredibly expensive history of that magazine: Even the people who continued to work there didn't, in recent months, think it could last.

I look forward to reading the numerous obituaries that will appear in coming days and weeks and will particularly salute anyone who can put a plausible dollar amount on how much Condé Nast spent trying to publish Portfolio. (You see the $100 million figure everywhere, but it could easily be 30 percent higher or lower than that.) Still, the trickier question is: Did it have to die? Is there anything that could have saved it?

The question was never a lack of talent; if anything, Portfolio hired too many talented people and didn't know how to make them play nice together. The knives have long been out for editor Joanne Lipman; Gawker in particular seemed to want her head as a trophy, and now they've got it. Lipman certainly bears her share of responsibility for judgements that at times spilled over from "baffling" into "perverse." Yet that's only part of the equation: OK, the publication was not going to succeed with her there, but could it have failed with someone else at the helm?

I think the answer is yes, and not only for the stunningly obvious reason that the global economy imploded, taking with it a good deal of Portfolio's would-be readers and advertisers. I think that Portfolio would have suffered even in a so-so economy, because it was ill-conceived from the very start. It was constructed as a business publication that would cover business the way it looks like from inside a few offices at Condé Nast, a world where uberwealthy hedge-fund managers compete to have witty things to say about 7,000-word Tom Wolfe stories while they collect tips about the latest places to buy eight-figure Francis Bacon paintings. Not to say that such people don't exist (or didn't once exist), but to imagine they formed the basis of a viable business magazine was to misunderstand the mission of business magazines. If Lipman could have collected a dollar for each time one of her staff members talked about the importance of "narrative," she probably would have collected more than the magazine got in subscription revenues. Narrative is a lovely and often helpful literary tool, but the fact that it works in Condé Nast magazines like Vanity Fair and The New Yorker does not mean narrative is what the business journalism audience wants.

Intimately connected to Portolio's narrative fallacy was the boneheaded move of making it a monthly (and then a 10-times-a-yearly). Think about the biggest business magazines out there: Business Week, Forbes, and Fortune. These publications have big, screaming problems right now, and from an editorial perspective, one of those problems is frequency. When you're up against the Wall Street Journal, the financial news portals, a dozen or so very good blogs and hundreds of OK ones, the ability to have and keep fresh ideas over the course of a few days is exceedingly difficult. To do it over the course of weeks and months is simply impossible, and I guarantee you that no editor or writer at the struggling incumbent business titles thinks that the solution to their problems is: Hey, let's go monthly!

Anyone paying attention to the business journalism genre over the past decade would have realized that you can't cover this world in a timely way if you publish only once a month. Eventually, Portfolio.com did some things very well, but its mission was never integrated enough with the magazine's (a critical problem at Condé Nast, as Lesley M.M. Blume documented on TBM last fall) to overcome the original sin of making it a monthly. And I can't believe that Condé Nast chose the monthly frequency for Portfolio for any good business reason—it's just what Condé Nast knows how to do. It doesn't do weeklies, except for The New Yorker (and even that was a Condé Nast acquisition, not an organic launch).