The recently launched business magazine Portfolio will now only be published 10 times a year, instead of 12. The December and January issues will be combined as will the June and July issues. Alley Insider reports that the web staff will be pared down to just 5 people. It currently has 20 employees. In addition to the cuts at Portfolio, Conde has rolled Men’s Vogue into Vogue, and will only publish Men’s Vogue twice a year.
The pain felt by newspapers is now hitting magazines hard. Conde Nast, the highly esteemed publisher of Portfolio, as well as Vanity Fair and The New Yorker has seen ad sales decline precipitously. 24/7 Wall Street reported earlier this week that “The New Yorker is down 24% through November. Vanity Fair is off 12% but its November issue lost 34% of its ad pages compared to the year before. Vogue dropped 7% but pages were down 32% for November compared to the same month in 2007.” They got their numbers from media newsletter MIN.
The numbers for all magazines are rather gruesome. In the business category, BusinessWeek has lost 17% of its ad pages, Forbes lost 16%, but Fortune managed to lift by 2%. Newsweek and U.S. News dropped 27% on average. And other titles like Cosmopolitan, Redbook and Good Housekeeping are also down.
The cuts at Portfolio are simultaneously expected and unexpected. From the start, Portfolio has been criticized. Launching a print product in the age of the internet was seen as foolish. Even executives at Conde Nast admitted the magazine would cost $150 million over the next few years before becoming profitable. Though the magazine was expected to lose money, many believed that Conde would allow the magazine to hemmorage cash for years, eventually delivering a terrific–and terrifically profitable–product, just like it did with Vanity Fair and The New Yorker. Apparently, this is not the case.
UPDATE: From MediaMemo:
Portfolio.com staffers have been told they have been meeting their revenue goals for 2008 while the magazine has not. According to a person who attended the meeting, one of the staff’s braver souls asked Carey why the Website was being punished more severely than the magazine.
“He gave a sort of corporatespeak answer, and what it appeared to boil down to is, is ‘This is a magazine company’,” says a person who attended the meeting. “And it left the impression that the website was sacrificed to save the magazine.”
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