Conde Nast to Shut Portfolio Magazine

CHICAGO (MarketWatch) -- Publisher Condé Nast will shutter Portfolio and its Web site by the end of the second quarter, it said Monday, as declining advertising sales across the industry claim another casualty, this time after only 21 issues.
Portfolio staffers received the news Monday morning from Editor-in-Chief Joanne Lipman.
Condé Nast had previously decided to scale back Portfolio to 10 issues a year from 12.
Last October, Condé Nast, whose other titles include the New Yorker, Vanity Fair and Wired, informed top executives at all 26 of its magazines to make two separate 5% cuts within its budget, reducing both payroll and nonpayroll expenses.
It also said it would fold Men's Vogue into Vogue, the long-running women's magazine, and cut it to two issues a year from a previous 10.
Portfolio, launched in May 2007, centers on the business of media, and as such has chronicled the painful decline of newspapers and magazines as a consumer shift to online readership and a devastating recession have combined to endanger the model that sustained such publications for generations. See First Take item on Portfolio's shutdown.
While newspapers and magazines have tried to create strong presences online, the money they receive for digital ads is not enough to sustain both Web-based and print versions.
Even without the overhead of printing presses and other costs related to the delivery of a print product, an online-only entity could struggle to maintain a newsgathering organization large and experienced enough to do battle amid ever-growing competition. http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/cond-nast-shut-portfolio-magazine/story.aspx?guid={1DCD02AC-32E9-4BDD-A8C2-6FDE32A41330}&dist=msr_1&print=true&dist=printMidSection