Portfolio.com: Mixed Media

Conde Nast Closing 'Portfolio'

Josh Moss — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 14:02:47 GMT

For nearly two years I've been covering the media industry's bad news on this blog, including some that's hit very close to home. Now it hits closer still: Condé Nast Portfolio is closing.

Our editor in chief, Joanne Lipman, just broke the news to staff, saying the decision had been made "because of financial reasons at Advance," Condé Nast's parent company. "It's not anything that the company wanted to do." She said she was informed by Condé Nast chairman S.I. Newhouse Jr. this morning of the decision.

Lipman said the magazine is ahead of its business plan on various business metrics, and also noted that it won a National Magazine Award last year after publishing only a handful of issues, a rare accomplishment. But a sharp and extended downturn in ad revenue has made success elusive. Over the past year, Condé Nast has made a series of other cutbacks, and has folded Domino and Golf for Women magazines.

UPDATE: On May 20, Condé Nast officials announced that Portfolio.com would get reborn as a product of American City Business Journals, which like Condé Nast, is a unit of Advance Publications.

Newspaper Circ: 'WSJ' Gains as 'NY Post' Tumbles

Jeff Bercovici — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 13:32:06 GMT

Rupert Murdoch may be losing the tabloid war, but he suddenly has a pretty good comeback next time someone accuses him of ruining The Wall Street Journal.

If I'm making such a hash of it, he could say, why is it the only big newspaper in America that's growing?

Okay, "growing" might be an overstatement. But according to the latest semi-annual report from the Audit Bureau of Circulations, the Journal is alone among the top 25 U.S. newspapers in reporting higher weekday circulation for the six months ending March 31, 2009, than for the same period a year earlier. Its circulation of 2,082,189 constituted a 0.6 percent increase.

That still leaves the Journal as the country's second-biggest paper. USA Today is No. 1, but its weekday circulation was down 7.5 percent in the period -- a decline it has attributed to lower occupancy at hotels, where it gives away lots of free copies.

The New York Times (-3.6 percent), the Washington Post (-1.2 percent), the Los Angeles Times (-6.6 percent), the Chicago Tribune) (-7.5 percent) and Newsday (-3 percent) all slid, but not as sharply as New York's twin tabloids. Mort Zuckerman's New York Daily News was down 14.3 percent, to 602,857 copies, while Murdoch's Post plunged 20.6 percent, to 558,140, as the paper recorded its first full circulation period since raising its cover price to 50 cents last summer.

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Idle Chatter: The Prognosis for Newspapers, more

Jeff Bercovici — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 12:55:09 GMT

-Newspapers are even more screwed than the auto industry: "Even if some publishers wiped out all their debt, they would still be creating a product with high fixed costs and declining revenue, as readers and advertisers migrate to the Internet. That's why closing the presses may be a more viable option than a Chapter 11-style restructuring." [Breakingviews on NYT]

-Maureen Dowd continues to play West Coast media reporter. I say if it keeps her from writing about Michelle Obama's arms, more power to her. [NYT]

-Facebook is opening up the information in its users news streams to third-party application developers. [WSJ]

-Coca-Cola Co. wants to change the way advertising agencies get paid; it's pushing for an industry-wide embrace of performance-based compensation, under which agencies will only get maximum payouts if the campaigns they create hit certain effectiveness targets. [Ad Age]
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Late Breaks: MySpace, NYT, 'New York'

Jeff Bercovici — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 20:01:09 GMT

-Former Facebook executive Owen van Natta is the new CEO of MySpace. [WSJ]

-The New York Times Company Foundation has suspended new grant awards and matching gifts. [AP]

-New York magazine has canceled two summer issues to save money. [Folio]
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Nostalgia, Entitlement and Murdoch's 'Journal'

Jeff Bercovici — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 20:00:41 GMT

Is practicing the more rarefied forms of journalism a right or a privilege? I'd say a privilege, but the way some people talk about the evolution of The Wall Street Journal since Rupert Murdoch bought it shows they take the other view.

Check out Scott Sherman's 5,000-worder in The Nation to see what I'm talking about. Although Sherman interviewed plenty of people who think the Journal is as good as it was before Dec. 2007, or even better, he still can't shake the nagging sense that a terrible injustice has been committed. "Murdoch has not corrupted the Journal," he concedes, grudgingly. But, just as damnably, "he has smothered it and made it ordinary."

Just what manner of smothering are we talking about? In brief, Murdoch has cut back somewhat, though not drastically, on long features; favored, among the features that remain, those that have some connection to the news of the day; instructed reporters to generate more scoops; and devoted more of the paper's space to news. More news in a newspaper? The fiend!

Obviously, if you want to cover more stories and get more scoops with the same number of reporters, something has to give. In this case, it was the Journal's "remarkable tradition of immersion journalism" -- the regime under which a reporter could go and spend two or three months burrowing into a potential page-one story without worry about daily deadlines.

Is it sad that Journal reporters can't get stretch their wings like they used to? Sure. Great stories, important stories, won't get written because of it. But, folks? The newspaper industry is collapsing. Entire papers are going out of business. Thousands and thousands of journalists are out of work (remarkably few of them, it should be noted, because of Murdoch, who has avoided major layoffs at the Journal and the New York Post). Amid this backdrop, to bewail, as Sherman does, that "[t]here isn't much room for sparkling, poignant features about prison carpenters in today's Journal" is a little like bitching about how hard it is to get a reservation at Per Se during a famine.

Yet bitch they do. Just listen to Josh Prager, who recently took a buyout and left, though not without tossing a Molotov cocktail over his shoulder on the way out. He tells Sherman,

What was great about the Journal was that it allowed people to pursue their different abilities. I'm good at writing long feature stories. I'm horrible at breaking news. They didn't make me do that after a while. That's why the paper worked.

Note the utter sense of entitlement: The Journal worked because it catered to the unique needs of its employees. Only a newspaper isn't a Montessori school, is it? And the Journal only "worked' in the sense that anything that loses millions of dollars (or tens of millions, if the estimates I've heard recently are accurate) can be said to work. You can't blame people for feeling nostalgic for the world the old Journal inhabited, but it's a world that's never coming back, and that's one thing you can't blame on Rupert Murdoch.
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Huffpo's Lerer on the 'New and Better' Journalism

Jeff Bercovici — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 16:44:53 GMT

Huffington Post co-founder and chairman Kenneth Lerer delivered a talk to students at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism last night. Portfolio.com's Alexandra Fenwick, a student at the school, was there. Here's her report.

HuffPo co-founder Ken Lerer says that newspaper publishers will be making a "huge mistake" if they put up pay walls around their content, but concedes that mass layoffs are "inevitable" in the journalism of the future, which he decrees will be lived online.

Lerer told journalists to stop whining and get with the digital revolution already at Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism last night, where he delivered the school's annual Hearst New Media Lecture to a chorus of real-time Tweets accompanying a simultaneous live-video feed of his speech.
"Ubiquity is the new exclusivity," he said in the sort of cable-news-ready aphorism more commonly heard from his partner, Arianna Huffington.
While Huffpo and its ilk have recently inherited the mantle from Craigslist as the villains responsible for the death of newspapers, and the AP has promised to sue aggregators that don't pay its fees (Huffpo pays) Lerer brought good tidings for journalism, if not so much for journalists.

"Anyone who whispers or says out loud that the future of journalism is in doubt could not be more wrong," he said. With more consumers of news than ever before, journalism is not in jeopardy but in transition to a "new and better place," he said. (Like heaven, maybe? That's where dead things go, right?)

But, in response to a Columbia alum and current Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reporter who mused on the Seattle Post-Intelligencer's decision to stop its presses and migrate to a web-only edition that only requires 20 of the 165 reporters it once employed, Lerer had a less rosy outlook.

"It is inevitable there are going to be a lot of unemployed newspaper reporters," he said.

Lerer, a past Executive Vice President of AOL Time Warner and the father of Thrillist.com Web entrepreneur Ben Lerer, taught an entrepreneurship class to journalism students as the school's Hearst New Media Professional-in-Residence this year. His lecture, entitled "How We Got Here and How We Get Out of Here," was the culmination of his year's worth of lessons. With it, Lerer joined a pantheon of eminent Hearst New Media lecturers including The New York Times' first public editor, Daniel Okrent, who spoke about the death of print waaay before it was fashionable, back in 1999, and Slate's Jack Shafer, who spoke in 2004 and recently told journalists to stop getting huffy about HuffPo's method of "lifting stories."

After an announcement from dean of student affairs, Sree Sreenivasan, that the school will change the name of its new media program to "digital journalism" because, "after 15 years it's not new media anymore," and another news tidbit with the introduction of News.com founder and former CNET.com editor-in-chief Jai Singh as the new managing editor of the Huffington Post, Lerer launched into an analysis of why newspapers have gotten the dots knocked off their i's in recent years. Along the way he contemplated what he would do if he were in various roles including dean of the school, a blogger, publisher of Time magazine and a newspaper owner, all of which boiled down to the lesson that resistance is futile.

"Embrace disruptive innovation," Lerer said. "Continuing to resist it is to fail to comprehend what has happened in the past 10 years."

Of the four reasons Lerer listed for newspapers' death spiral, the concept of the "the innovator's dilemma," a phenomenon chronicled in a 1997 book of the same name by Clayton Christensen was the most insightful. In this scenario, Lerer explained, good companies are always doomed to fail by virtue of the same success that made them good in the first place. Nobody was clamoring for Internet coverage 10 years ago, Lerer said, so newspapers focused on getting the print edition right. Today's it's too late to own the Internet, too. So in order to survive, a company must know what its customers want before they know it themselves. No sweat, right? Print newspapers' problem is that they were too successful at being newspapers, and got complacent. To stay alive, online newspapers have to think of themselves as technology companies as well as media companies, Lerer said.

He then floated the various ideas for reviving newspapers' business model, dismissing most of them in the same breath. Lerer isn't a fan of building walled gardens and charging for stories, establishing a middleman to pay for all access to online content, offering tax subsidies for newspaper subscribers, micropayments for stories like songs for iTunes or a bailout for newspapers that would allow them to apply for nonprofit status with a variety of tax breaks.

He seemed more jazzed about the following ideas:

- Hyper-specialization. According to this theory, ten million subject-specific blogs are better than one general interest newspaper.

- Investigative funds to finance in-depth open-source investigative reporting. For example, ProPublica or micro-financed Spot Journalism or, oh, the one that HuffPo recently launched.

- Newspapers as aggregators. Instead of reporting news, publications would find the best stories across the Web and offer their seal of approval.

- Focus on analysis, not newsgathering. The theory behind this one is that there's so much information out there, not every paper needs to write its own version of the same story.

- Close down the presses today. It costs The New York Times twice as much to print and deliver the paper each year as it would to buy a Kindle for every customer, Lerer pointed out.

Instead of fearing the future online, journalists, especially those just starting out, should embrace it, Lerer said. Before going to the business side of media, he was a writer, himself, freelancing stories for the Village Voice and New York magazine but gave it up when he couldn't make ends meet. If he'd had the platform that blogs now provide he might have made it as a writer, he surmised.

"I was dying. What was I getting paid? $200 for a piece in the Village Voice, and there was nowhere I could go." he said. "Today I could do so much more it's not even funny -- I really could write and get it out there and show people how good or bad I was."

As it is, he doesn't much like blogging.

"I've tried it once or twice and I got some negative comments and I didn't like it. I get hurt feelings very easily as my family will tell you," he said.

That became apparent as he dodged a series of questions that followed, included one that was Twittered in, asking whether it was correct to conclude that only entrepreneurial journalists and hobbyists who don't need to rely on their writing for an income could survive in the landscape Lerer had described.

"That person made that up, I didn't say either of those things. He's not listening because he's not here," Lerer said, dismissing the question as the audience laughed." "No one in this room thinks I said that. Next question."

Lest anyone needed reminding that Lerer became not a writer in the end, but a businessman, and a very successful one at that, that reply did the trick. It was clear his patience for debating the future of journalism had run out, because for him, there's no debate. His closing remarks took on a similarly adamant, somewhat bullying but always businesslike quit-messing-around-and-get-down-to-brass-tacks tone. He marveled that 30 years ago it took 30 years to build a brand but that it can be done online practically overnight today, in just a year, and urged brands to get building.

"If you start, it happens so much faster than you could imagine, it's spectacular," Lerer said. "And if you don't, it will never happen. Stop arguing and just do it. It's the bottom line."
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Ailes Heats Up Cold Spring with Newspaper War

Jeff Bercovici — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 16:33:10 GMT

How much does Roger Ailes love business bloodsport? Enough that, having evidently bored of trouncing CNN and MSNBC in the cable-news rating race, he's trying to wage a newspaper war in New York's sleepy Putnam County.

As I've reported before, Ailes has over the past year acquired two weekly newspapers, the Putnam County News & Recorder and the Putnam County Courier, installing his wife, Elizabeth, as publisher of both.

This week, the News & Recorder went after its chief competition, the Gannett-owned Journal News, with a populist-tinged broadside that will be familiar to anyone who's followed Fox News's persecution of GE and The New York Times.

In an article headlined "Journal News in Trouble: Shrinking daily newspaper tries to cover Putnam from Westchester," reporter Joe Lindsley Jr. recaps the Journal News's recent layoffs, circulation declines and format-shrinkage, as well as the cost-cutting measures, including furloughs, at Gannett.

That's the set up. This is the punch line:

While Journal News staffers have been losing their jobs, the paper's brass seems to have escaped the recession, for now. Mr. [Michael] Fisch, president and publisher, purchased a $3.1 million dollar home on Penwood Road in Mount Kisco in January 2008. He also owns properties in the upscale communities of Mesa, Arizona, and Lakewood, Colorado. The paper's editor, Mr. Henry Freeman, lives in Mount Kisco on Greeley Court, where home prices average about a million dollars.

Lindsley also accuses Fisch of hypocrisy for saying that it's fair game to publish the addresses of newspaper owners (and the salaries of policemen) but not those of newspaper publishers. The story's behind a pay wall, unfortunately.

I asked Elizabeth Ailes whether she's looking to pick a fight with the competition. This was her response, via email: "Absolutely not. We covered a decline in the local newspaper business and responded to a few things that they had brought up in their coverage of our purchasing the paper."

I haven't heard back from Fisch.
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Happy Friday. Now Watch This.

Jeff Bercovici — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 14:24:52 GMT

I'm not even going to bother to explain this (but if you need explanation, read this New York Observer story). It's the best thing since Lil' O'Reilly.

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Idle Chatter: NPR Cutbacks, Jon Meacham, more

Jeff Bercovici — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 12:50:33 GMT

-NPR is laying off more employees -- although no one in programming this time -- and also mandating company-wide furloughs, benefit cuts and a freeze on merit raises. [WaPo]

-Randi Rhodes, the former Air America host who was suspended from that network after calling Hillary Clinton "a big fucking whore" in a comedy routine, has signed on with Premiere Radio Networks, the on-air home to Rush Limbaugh. [WSJ]

-Newsweek editor Jon Meacham, who this week won a Pulitzer Prize for his biography of Andrew Jackson, is working on a new book about George H.W. Bush. [NYP]

-Gawker is on a mission to ambush Jesse Watters, the O'Reilly Factor producer who handles the show's ambush interviews. [Gawker]
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Late Breaks: Twitter and the 'Times,' more

Jeff Bercovici — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 21:59:20 GMT

-Some guy thinks The New York Times Co., which doesn't make enough money, can save its bacon by buying Twitter, which makes no money. I think some guy needs to go back to math school. [HBR]

-New York Observer editor Peter Kaplan, who's leaving the paper after 15 years, may land in the No. 2 job at Condé Nast Traveler. [WWD]

-People now spend more time on Facebook than the do using web-based email. [The Deal]
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