Lipman to blame for Portfolio's failure

Paul Smalera, a former Conde Nast Portfolio staffer, writes on Gawker that the business magazine’s demise rests solely on the shoulders of editor Joanne Lipman.

Smalera writes, “Yet in too many ways to enumerate here, we did not operate in what I fondly call a reality-based environment. In Lipman’s meetings, firings were never firings, stories were never bad or ill timed, mistakes were never made. The air had long been sucked out of that room, and few staffers seemed to believe anymore in the mission of the place, despite a collective desire, and I mean this, to do as good a job as they could do, given the circumstances.

“Early in my time there, I saw a Deputy Editor I learned from and respected be run out on a rail for his insouciance, his belief that the magazine could be a great thing. I wondered, as those early undercurrents of dissent began to swell, why no one was pointing out the empress had no clothes. Wasn’t this journalism, capital J? Didn’t it matter when seasoned vets thought we were going about things in a haphazard, disjointed, unfocused and fundamentally wrong way? Yes, but. These were also jobs, capital J. And as is now clear, no one, inside or out, was ever going to save Lipman from herself.

“And who knows, as her faltering became apparent, what kind of pressures Lipman faced from her boss, and his boss, and Newhouse himself, that further distorted the title? Essentially, it’s hard to take principled stands when you work pretty much at the beneficence of a billionaire. And if you’re wondering what’s wrong with journalism these days, that’s pretty much it.”

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