As a rule I generally don’t talk about the goings on at my own company, Conde Nast. I do this for all of the most self-apparent reasons, #1 being: I like me job and I like the company environment, hence I’d like to keep it.

That said today is a special day, today is the day Portfolio died. I have to admit this took me by surprise, Conde Nast has a corporate culture that would rather kill a weaker property, then make any of the major’s skimp in even the slightest of way. (It’s why they call this place: Publishing Valhalla) Men’s Vogue, Golf for Women, even domino seemed to be prime targets for closure. All of them had small niches, limited advertiser interest, and low growth prospects. And there are other properties that fit that description still at Conde, if more properties where to be on the block.

But Portfolio was different, much like The New Yorker or Vanity Fair, this had a high-income demographic, broader advertisers, and starting from 0 and topping over 400K subs in a 2-year period ain’t that bad. Given that Si Newhouse has a history of sticking with his beloved books through unprofitability, again see New Yorker and Vanity Fair, I thought for sure he was in it to win it with Portfolio.

Last year, Portfolio cut from 12-to-10 editions a year, and slashed their online staff. The magazine was well known to be one of the best paying gigs a financial writer could land. Conde sunk $100MM into the launch of this property. With the economy the way it is, I’d say the publication was simply too expensive to continue, with establishment now depending on a turn-around.

People have argued in hind-sight that this was a bad investment. I disagree. I think it out-gleamed the pack by a mile with writers that packed pounds-per-inch. The problem was an incoherent web/print strategy, with a top management, Joanne Lipman, who mis-cued the direction and misspent resources.

Firstly, the website Portfolio.com had top-notch bloggers in Salmon, Market Movers, and Bercovici, Mixed Media, whom actually broke the news of Portfolio’s end. Yet, for all of the great work that they did, and news that they broke, it was almost completely disconnected from what appeared in the Magazine from month-to-month. This is the Conde way. The web is run out of Conde Nast Digital, formerly CondeNet, and the magazines are disconnected from their associated web properties, run out of Conde Nast. ‘Never the Twain Shall Meet’. This is how the company is run, and was setup this way along time ago with good reasons. (See Style.com and Epicurious.com)

But in the case of a Portfolio, this was a liability. The site was very popular, but Ms. Lipman was dismissive of the web once remarking, ‘reading bloggers is like listening to a crazy person on the Subway.’ So what was a very successful web strategy, hit wise, was being undermined, used mainly as a conduit to print subscriptions, a fancy Consumer Marketing play at best.

Rather than treat the web as a daily conduit to its readers to expand coverage, preview upcoming pieces, and provide a daily must read to complement the expanded overviews, insights, and analysis to be found in the magazine it was relegated to scraps. But like I said, that is the culture, for good reasons, and bad. (This does appear to be changing…)

Secondly, Joanna Lipman was the wrong person for this job, period. A launch publication needs a certain type of person whom is willing to experiment, risk, and lead the competition, aka an entrepreneur. That’s not what you get from a former editor of the WSJ Magazine. No, someone who has ‘stayed the course’ and piggy-backed off a stronger publication will run to safety every time. Like putting Sara Palin on the cover the same month Obama is inaugurated.

This is all on top of the fact, that Lipman was spending company money on frivolities, like 5-star hotels and first class flights to Davos, when everyone of importance was already skipping the event. I’m sure that these things are par for the course in most publishing environments, but when advertisers are fleeing, times are tight, and your firing people, to then spend $20K on luxury expenses is not ‘financially intelligent’.

UPDATED: So i read this piece by Andrea Chalupa who is far kinder then what I have heard elsewhere, and was employed on the dot com side. I’ve reconsidered my above criticisms a bit.

here is how she tells it:

It was founded to capture the extreme excess of life on Wall Street and the insane wealth circulating the globe. The world had a new class of super-rich, and Portfolio would be the magazine to document their lives. It viewed itself as a resource of business insight and lifestyle tips for executives and CEOs — the new rock stars — and their fans, who aspired to be like them. Some detractors, and even some admirers, viewed it as rich-people porn.

Along with the sober, prescient business analysis of Jesse Eisinger and Felix Salmon, there were eye-popping stories: how to buy an island, how to develop your own golf course, a $40,000 iPhone, a billion-dollar house. It covered smart, sane economics, and luxurious oligarch-bait.

Within a year, all that changed — sort of. On its November 2007 cover, when Eisinger predicted major bank collapses, even some of us staffers had thought he sounded as wild as a doomsday prophet. That feeling only lasted a couple of months, until Bear Stearns capsized suddenly in early 2008. The editors toned down the lifestyle stories, keeping more tightly focused on how our business leaders were impacting the world rather than how many cars they kept in their garages. With the economic world in turmoil, it seemed like this was the right time for a magazine like Portfolio, and particularly a website.

“Conde Nast, as successful a company as it is, it’s not in the business of publishing business news. It’s in the business of aggregating high-end readers and selling them to luxury advertisers,” Bercovici told me by phone this morning.

…

“I don’t think it’s a doomsday scenario,” Bercovici told me, “in the sense of magazines surviving as magazines. Conde Nast is the fittest of the companies to survive that transition. The whole industry is going to be more like the British magazine industry, in terms of staffing levels and cost structure. [But] you can’t beat brands like Vogue and Vanity Fair; they will survive a lot better than a lot of other brands.”

It’s not just that, the interplay between reader and advertiser is unique to each brand. The placement of any ad into any specific publication places the product into the public conscience at the associated level. In light of this branding approach, Lipman’s travel expenses are understandable, trying to promote an image and all that. But the placement itself is more confusing.

I agree it makes perfect sense to try and grab the uber-rich with a Conde magazine, and bundle the associated luxury brand advertisers. But that’s only ever going to be small group, high subscription rate, high rate card, low run endeavor. It’s like W magazine, fashion for women who can afford it. Which, as it would happen, was a successful as a launch. A mass publication; life-styles of the rich and famous, doesn’t pair well with economic analysis. Its two different types of reader.

The great thing about Vogue, GQ, & Vanity Fair is that you have no idea what the price is, its small and secondary, what you know is that if it’s in the magazine, its worth it. That’s a ‘high-end reader’. People whom ‘ooohh’ and ‘aaaahhhh’ at some price tag, like a $40K iPhone or Billion dollar house, are not. (Who would buy that stuff except some crypto-capitalist oligarch?)

My Way:

Rather than just point fingers and yell ‘ha ha, told you so!’ I am going to start explaining what I would do differently and why. Starting Now –

If I were called to run Portfolio in 2007, I would have gone in a totally untapped direction from Business Week, Money, Inc, Fast Company ect ect.

I would have made Portfolio a Business Magazine for Women. The tag line would be:

‘My Portfolio includes…

30 commercial investment properties,

50 residential,

2 dogs,

a 17 year-old-son,

and me.’

Leveraging the Conde Nast Fashion and Beauty advertiser network as a base, I would run recurring features on various professional fashions: suites, business casual, comfy Heels, stylish sneakers, 5 minute makeup, ect. All of these, would be intergraded with a digital shopping cart, so these busy women can buy anything we feature, direct from the advertiser with one-click. (Payment and sizing information would be stored, discounts for subscribers!)

Every month would feature a real women’s schedule showing her work/life balance, and a column on how she copes, manages, and what she would change to make it easier. This would be a sponsored sweepstakes-type feature, most applicable to travel and spa’s, but also Blackberry.

Furthermore, I would place strong emphasis on technology for working women. I’m talking ultra-thin, sleek stylish phones, laptops that look like real ‘Notebooks’ (the kind that people used to actually write in with a pen), all the way to luxury cars; but always focused on the feminine value of ‘style meets practicality’. Coincidently, this also gives a strong hand to play with tech advertisers, as women are more likely to pay premiums for rare/stylish goods, especially those featured in the mag that can be purchased in one-click.

Now here is where the real trick comes into play: if you want to be featured in our one-click shopping, you MUST buy X pages of print advertising, and we get a percentage of the buy directly attributable to our site, as a referral fee.

My next biggest change would be to have in-debt coverage of professional events in various industries in real-time, via the web using twitter, youtube, email, ect. The deal being predicated, that if an organization wants their event to be covered they have to advertise it first in the magazine.

This is not exhaustive, nor complete. Monthly features are highly contextual, and can’t be systematized. But it is to say that as an idea, a new business magazine, Portfolio, could have been a winner, if they had played more to their strengths, and had a different head, IMHO.

And No, I have never run a million-dollar business.

(The above is my own opinion, it in no way reflects the views of anyone at Conde Nast, its subsidiaries, or affiliates, other than myself. And I could be completely wrong, time will tell)