Why was Portfolio even started?

Howard Gold, the executive editor of MoneyShow.com and former editor of Barron’s Online for 10 years, wonders why Conde Nast Portfolio, a business magazine closed after two years, was even launched.

Gold writes, “How can anyone have launched a new print business magazine in 2007? And although in some journalistic circles, print — and a certain cable network — are still the gold standard, the audience for financial information and analysis migrated online a long time ago. Any business that ignores that is doomed to fail.

“That’s why when I read the accounts of life inside Portfolio’s gilded fishbowl, I wondered, what planet are these people on? And what century do they think they’re in? Overpaid writers strutting and griping — and not producing. Ego-driven news meetings where nothing was resolved. A reported $100 million of Conde Nast’s money down the drain. And never a clear statement of what this particular magazine was bringing to the table in a very crowded market.

“What jumped out at me most, however, was how much of an afterthought online appeared to be in the grandiose plans of Conde Nast’s reclusive owner S.I. Newhouse, Jr. and Portfolio’s editor in chief Joanne Lipman, formerly a top editor at the print Wall Street Journal.

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