Could Portfolio have survived?

James Ledbetter writes on The Big Money about the death of business magazine Conde Nast Portfolio and wonders whether it could have survived under different circumstances.

Ledbetter writes, “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.Â

“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).”

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