Portfolio magazine killed, but don't blame advertisers

Business magazine Portfolio was a big-dollar, high-powered publication launched in April 2007 by Condé Nast, the hugely successful magazine publisher whose lineup includes The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Vogue, and Wired. Designed as an upscale competitor for Forbes and Fortune, Portfolio was staffed by hand-picked, well-paid veteran editors and writers -- many hired away from perfectly good jobs by the offer of outsized salaries. Today, Condé Nast announced the magazine has been shut down completely.

What happened? Condé Nast management told The New York Times that the sheer-cliff dropoff in advertising spending doomed the expensive-to-produce Portfolio.

BusinessWeek media pundit Jon Fine has a long, detailed analysis. In short, he says advertisers stayed away because they saw there wasn't a demand for the magazine among the readers at whom it was aimed:

Conde Nast made a classic mistake of spotting a consumer magazine "opportunity" based on advertising and demographic considerations, not actual reader demand. It debuted at the end of a business boom, not at the beginning of one. It came at a time when business is a moment-by-moment bloodsport uniquely unsuited to being chronicled by a leisurely monthly frequency.

There's a more basic truth: Magazine publishing isn't a cold supply-meets-demand business. It's an entertainment industry. Magazines aren't phone books or O'Reilly software manuals. They're vehicles for desire. People buy magazines not to read dryly about how life is, but to fantasize about how it could be. That's true even for The Economist, which serves up a free-market, rational vision for a world that mostly rejects it.

Portfolio had all the right parts in order. The mag's online Blogonomics posts were great for me, both sharp and sharp-tongued. But like a movie, an album or a novel, sometimes a work that has every reason to be a hit just doesn't catch fire.