Thursday, May 21, 2009
AOL Lands Another Media Refugee: Portfolio.com’s Bercovici to DailyFinance
I don’t usually write about writers landing jobs, but I did want to point out that Jeff Bercovici, last seen writing the Mixed Media blog for Portfolio.com, has landed at DailyFinance, a site run by Time Warner’s AOL. Why do I care? Because it’s yet another sign that AOL is continuing to hire experienced writers and reporters to bulk up its sites as other publishers are slimming down or shutting down. And because it’s a nice change of pace from layoff stories.
Never say never: Condé Nast, which is closing down its Portfolio business magazine, has decided not to turn off the lights at Portfolio.com. Instead, it is shifting control of the Web site–essentially, the Portfolio.com address and a couple years of archived content–over to American City Business Journals, its corporate cousin in the Advance Publications family.
Time Warner’s AOL can spin positive news out of the miserable results it offered up today. But Ann Moore, who runs Time Warner’s Time Inc. publishing business, will have a tougher time selling that story to investors and Time Warner executives. Will she need to make a second round of cuts?
While the chattering classes continue to pick over Portfolio’s bones, it’s worth checking in on the business titles Condé Nast was targeting with its ill-fated magazine. In short: None of them are suffering from a Portfolio-like swoon, but they’re all in lousy shape. And while we’re at it, let’s dispense with the story that Condé Nast burned $100 million or more on this one.
Condé Nast is shuttering its troubled Portfolio title and accompanying Web site. The publisher informed its staff of the decision at a meeting this morning. “The company is deeply grateful to Portfolio’s readers and for the broad support of marketers and executives all around the country,” says publisher David Carey.
User-generated news aggregators like Reddit are notoriously difficult sites to pitch to advertisers, but Condé Nast may have figured out how to do it. If it works, it could be promising news for Digg, which has a bigger audience but the same problems.
Think Web ads are annoying now? An industry trade group says they’re not annoying enough. Get ready for the “XXL Box” and “the pushdown”–online ads that insist on your attention.
What happens to the value of blogs when advertising craters and big media companies go into a tailspin? Take a guess. But a new list comparing top blog operations isn’t all bad news.
Consumers hate Web ads because they’re boring and annoying. Publishers hate them because they get cheaper every day. A group of Yahoo vets, funded by Forbes, thinks they have a solution: Really nice-looking slideshows.
