Why do I care?

• Because his hire is yet another indicator that AOL is continuing to hire experienced writers and reporters–often from ailing publications–to build up its own sites, a strategy championed by content czar Bill Wilson’s MediaGlow. AOL has been steadily hiring journalism vets and using them to reinvigorate existing sites like its FanHouse sports hub and to launch new ones like PoliticsDaily. Other recent hires include Mitch Lipka, a consumer finance writer for the Boston Globe who will join AOL’s Walletpop, and David Wood, a longtime national security writer for the Baltimore Sun,  who is joining PoliticsDaily.
• Because it means that the not-going-to-shut-down-after-all Portoflio.com won’t feature its two marquee bloggers. Felix Salmon, Bercovici’s former colleague at the Condé Nast site, had already left for Reuters to start a finance blog earlier this year.
• Because Bercovici is damned good at the media beat, so I’m going to need to bookmark his page and add his RSS feed into my reader.
• And because I’ve been writing about layoffs since I started this column in October, and this is a nice change of pace.

Plans for the move were first reported yesterday by the New York Observer.

The swap is really a testament to the power of Google (GOOG) and the long-tail theory: Even though Condé had been running Portfolio.com with a skeleton crew since the beginning of the year, the site was still generating four to five million page views a month, primarily because of search queries, says Condé Nast Group President David Carey. So that alone made Portfolio.com worth saving.

It will now serve as the central hub for ACBJ, a collection of 40 local business publications (including one I used to work for many moons ago). But it won’t just be an aggregator, insists ACBJ President Tim Bradbury. He intends to rebuild the site’s staff–he’s keeping two of the last Portfolio.com employees and intends to launch with a full-time editorial staff of five, plus freelancers–and pump out new content.

Bradbury says he’d “like to get the old band back together,” but I’m not sure exactly what that means. In the last few months of Portfolio.com’s life, the site was essentially a blogging platform for the excellent duo of Felix Salmon, who covered finance, and Jeff Bercovici, who covered media. But Salmon jumped ship for Reuters prior to the shutdown, so he’s presumably locked up. No word on Bercovici’s plans. But even if Bradbury can’t get those two back on board, I’m guessing there’s no shortage of applicants for full-time and contract slots.

Here’s the release:

New York, NY, May 20, 2009 – Portfolio.com will become part of the American City Business Journal’s bizjournals.com effective in July, it was announced today by Tim Bradbury, President, American City Business Journals, New Media, (ACBJ) and David Carey, Group President, Condé Nast. ACBJ and Condé Nast are units of Advance Publications.

Bizjournals.com will oversee both the editorial and business sides of the site. The Portfolio.com editorial team and sales staff will be based in New York. In addition to newly created content, the site will share content with other Condé Nast sites including Wired.com, GolfDigest.com, and WWD.com, as it did previously. The site will also be the home of the archives of all the popular content published by Portfolio’s print and digital properties over the last two years.

“We are excited about continuing Portfolio.com and including the site in the bizjournals network because we were impressed by Portfolio’s strong web presence, its clean and crisp design, and its voice in the business journalism marketplace,” Tim Bradbury, President, American City Business Journals, New Media said. “We believe our readers will benefit as the re-launched Portfolio.com will have a stronger focus on industry news and a greater mission to offer information relevant to today’s business professionals.”

On top of its existing strengths, Portfolio.com will be able to leverage the collaborative skills and insights of the more than 600 ACBJ business journalists around the country. The site now will have access to local market intelligence and work collaboratively with ACBJ newsrooms across the country, presenting the most important local insights through a national lens and making it unique among national business media.

“We knew that Portfolio.com was a highly valuable asset, with an established digital brand, strong direct navigation by users, and a solid long tail of traffic from content published over the past two years,” David Carey, Group President, Condé Nast said. “We saw ACBJ as a perfect match due to its great editorial resources in the business arena, and view this as a win for both Portfolio.com’s readers and the company.”

Condé Nast Portfolio magazine and its website Portfolio.com, launched in April 2007 and the magazine closed in April 2009. The site provided insight into the day’s top business stories, with analysis from bloggers and columnists. During those two years Portfolio.com grew to 2.8 million monthly uniques and won industry praise with awards such as the MIN:  Best of Web 2008, MIN: Hottest Launch of the Year 2007, WebAward: Outstanding Achievement in Website Development 2007, and Webby nominees in Best Business blog and Financial Services categories.

The magazine’s May issue, which is out now, will be its last. The Web site will be shuttered “in the second quarter,” the company says.

Portfolio has had its doubters even prior to its launch in 2007. Long before the advertising market cratered, critics worried that the market couldn’t support a fourth business magazine to compete with Forbes, Time Warner’s (TWX ) Fortune and McGraw-Hill’s (MHP) BusinessWeek; they also marveled at the reported $100 million budget that Condé Nast had committed to the launch.

No telling whether that bet would have paid off in a healthier market for the high-end advertising that business magazines thrive on. (But likely not: “Condé Nast made a classic mistake of spotting a consumer magazine ‘opportunity’ based on advertising and demographic considerations, not actual reader demand,” as BusinessWeek’s Jon Fine puts it). But the current market is as bad as it could get: In the first three months of 2009, magazine ad pages declined more than 25 percent, according to an industry trade group, and Portfolio’s pages dropped by more than 60 percent. Some of that drop stems from the magazine’s move to a 10-issue-a-year schedule, down from 12 a year.

But Portfolio has been suffering for quite some time. Last fall, the magazine laid off a good portion of its staff and turned its Web site into a skeleton operation. And parent Condé Nast, which also made a round of layoffs last fall, has continued to cut back this year, eliminating perks, staff and titles throughout the company. In March CEO Chuck Townsend sent out a memo warning that “as the downturn extends, we have to make additional difficult decisions to manage costs and ensure our financial well-being.”

Here’s the full statement from Carey:

Earlier today, Condé Nast announced, quite regrettably, that it is pulling back from its investment in Portfolio.

For this high-profile, 21-issue launch, the recession has helped and hurt the brand. While the unprecedented nature of these times has made business and the economy the main topic of conversation, it has also led to high levels of uncertainty and a tremendous reduction in ad spend in the five key sectors Portfolio’s business model depends on.

The company is deeply grateful to Portfolio’s readers and for the broad support of marketers and executives all around the country.

And here’s the beginning of the magazine’s obituary from soon-to-be-unemployed Portfolio.com media writer Jeff Bercovici:

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.

And here’s the press release:

Condé Nast will cease publication of Portfolio effective with its May issue and Portfolio.com will close in the second quarter of the year, it was announced today by Charles H. Townsend, President and CEO of Condé Nast.

“The pressures and realities of the continuous deep economic slump have lowered Portfolio’s revenue projections below what is needed to continue publication,” Mr. Townsend said. “Portfolio was an ambitious and innovative magazine and website, and we were proud to publish them. The challenges facing this launch however proved too great. Joanne Lipman is an extraordinarily skillful editor and William Li is a very talented publisher. We thank them and their staffs for their tremendous efforts. It is unfortunate we were unable to give Portfolio the time needed to fully mature.”

Portfolio and Portfolio.com were launched in May 2007. The magazine has published 21 issues since its launch. The magazine received a National Magazine Award in 2008 and has been nominated for multiple awards since.

Condé Nast Publications, a unit of Advance Publications, includes consumer magazines, Condé Nast Digital, the Fairchild Fashion Group, the Condé Nast Media Group, and the Shared Services Centers.

No more. Greenfield has cut his recommendation on the company from a “Buy” to a “Sell.” His logic: “While we have long viewed Rupert Murdoch as the most visionary CEO in the media sector…we are increasingly surprised/frustrated with his lack of strategic direction related to News Corp’s television station, newspaper and book publishing assets.”

To tease that out, Greenfield sees News Corp. as two different businesses: There’s a group of “good” assets–its film studio, cable networks, MySpace, etc.–and a group of “bad” assets–its broadcast TV and newspaper units, including Dow Jones, which owns this site. (Uh-oh).

The analyst previously argued that the “bad” businesses would wither away without pulling down the rest of the company; now he worries that Murdoch, who isn’t known as a sentimentalist but is known for his love of newspapers, will prop up his money-losers for too long:

Our fear is that News Corp. is so committed to its existing businesses that it will be willing to sustain businesses that slip into negative profitability for years, (similar to its approach to the NY Post). We believe several of its TV stations are or will shortly be ‘in the red,’ with book publishing heading for losses, as well as a significant number of its Newspapers. In fact, on a reported operating income basis, Dow Jones will generate meaningful losses in its first full-year of News Corp. ownership following its $5.7 billion acquisition.”

So perhaps this will cheer up Greenfield, though it won’t be good for me or for my colleagues: Portfolio.com’s Jeff Bercovici is reporting that Dow Jones’s Wall Street Journal will be making newsroom cuts next week:

It’s unclear exactly how many employees will be affected, but two sources put the number of people being targeted at 50. (If, as seems likely, that is the number of people on the list to be offered buyouts, then the actual number of jobs eliminated could be substantially lower.) It’s also rumored that there will be parallel cuts at Dow Jones Newswires, and that one or more Journal bureaus may be eliminated as part of the cutbacks. A Dow Jones spokeswoman declined to comment.”

And if you think that none of that makes sense, don’t worry. Everyone knows you can’t charge people a penny to read something on the Web–especially a weekly publication.

Except that you can: The Economist does a (relatively) healthy business while keeping its weekly magazine behind a subscription paywall. So does the Wall Street Journal’s Barron’s. And as the online ad business continues to evaporate, charging people for access to stuff they want does not seem completely insane.

“We’re creating a tailored product for readers that does what the old newsweeklies did, which was to stop time for people and say ‘What the heck happened over the last week?’ and make sense of it,” editor Brian Kelly tells Portfolio.com’s Jeff Bercovici.

Alas, the new publication seems like a classic tweener: It won’t have enough heft or substance to justify an offline existence. And it won’t be nimble enough to take advantage of the Web’s real-time, did you hear what just happened flexibility, because it’s literally going to be a weekly publication, distributed via downloadable PDF file.

But I’d love to be proved wrong here, because I’ve got a vested interest in viable content production models. And if this one works, I’ll be happy to eat my words. Maybe you’ll pay to watch.

New York Times, Nov. 7: “I was talking to a friend of mine who works in the industry. He’s very wise. I said, “What should I do next?” And he said, “Get out of journalism.” He’s probably right; he’s got a good read on things. But I probably wouldn’t do anything different.”

Time Out New York, Winter Bar Guide: On her dream job: “Writing for you, editing for you, preferably not recapping The Hills for you, but—who am I kidding—that’s totally negotiable.”

New York Post, Dec. 15: “Everything everyone is reading is doom and gloom, so there is a lot of anxiety about the job market,” she said. “There are positions out there–people still need editors, writers and reporters–but now, there is a surplus of very talented and qualified people looking for the same jobs.”

However Paige Ferrari generated the flood-the-zone coverage of herself, it has worked (sort of), says the Post. The paper reports that she has “has landed a part-time gig as a Web editor:

Since negotiations haven’t been finalized, she’s keeping mum on the details. But she did say it’s a Web site that covers pop culture.

‘It’s great for me,’ said Ferrari, 26, who lives in the East Village. ‘It’s part-time, so it gives me the flexibility to freelance, choose my own projects and make my own schedule.’”

More power to her. Let’s hope that other well-publicized unemployed media people have similar luck–and that not too many more of us join their ranks.

Thanks Jeff Bercovici, one of the last men standing at Portfolio.com, for pointing this one out.

[Image Credit: New York Post]

Portfolio.com media blogger Jeff Bercovici posted a short item about one of the panels yesterday afternoon; later that evening, the story had disappeared.

It should never have run in the first place, Portfolio.com managing editor Daniel Colarusso tells me. That’s because Portfolio magazine was a sponsor of the event (editor in chief Joanne Lipman moderated one panel; Washington editor Matt Cooper moderated the one that Bercovici wrote about) and is honoring its no-press rules.

Again, it’s Quadrangle’s conference, and they can run it however they’d like. But it seems particularly ironic that the one story that did get published, then pulled, was about a panel of professional communicators: CBS (CBS) news anchor Katie Couric, NBC anchor Brian Williams and ABC’s George Stephanopoulos.

Some MediaMemo readers have asked me to reprint all of Bercovici’s story, but I don’t have access to it. I can tell you, however, that is a very short story–maybe three or four paragraphs long–and that the text I quoted yesterday was the most interesting part. Here it is again:

Couric shed some light on her preparation for the interviews: Beforehand, she sought advice from former senator Sam Nunn and Council on Foreign Relations president Richard Haas. They told her to draw Palin out on her geopolitical worldview and urged her to let the governor speak at length without interrupting her. Maybe she should bring them along with her when she takes over at Meet the Press?”

Meanwhile, Quadrangle really has bigger problems on its mind these days than unauthorized blog posts. It is shutting down its media hedge fund after sustaining losses of 25 percent year-to-date.

So who said what at Quadrangle’s Foursquare conference, and was any of it interesting?

You got me. The media and tech confab is off the record. And so far, the members of the fourth estate who attended the event yesterday seem to be keeping their mouths shut.

But I did talk briefly with an attendee, who told me that the most interesting panel was the one that Portfolio’s Matt Cooper conducted this afternoon with television personalities Katie Couric, Brian Williams and George Stephanopoulos.

That would be an interesting group under any circumstance, but even more so since Couric’s interview of Republican VP candidate and Alaska governor Sarah Palin for CBS (CBS) is now considered to be a turning point in the 2008 election.

And while Couric hasn’t talked publicly about the interviews yet, she apparently did dish a bit today, according to a source who talked to Portfolio.com’s Jeff Bercovici:

Couric shed some light on her preparation for the interviews: Beforehand, she sought advice from former senator Sam Nunn and Council on Foreign Relations president Richard Haas. They told her to draw Palin out on her geopolitical worldview and urged her to let the governor speak at length without interrupting her. Maybe she should bring them along with her when she takes over at Meet the Press?”

UPDATE: Bercovici’s report has been pulled. Details here.

One newsworthy item not covered in Bercovici’s account: After the event, Couric gave Twitter correspondent MC Hammer a smooch, which was apparently well-received.