Friday, October 30, 2009
BusinessWeek’s Future Is Cloudy, but Better Than It Could Have Been: The Grim Non-Bloomberg Scenario
BusinessWeek employees are waiting to hear if they’ll have jobs once Bloomberg takes over the publication, and I’m told that staffers expect to hear their fate shortly after Thanksgiving. That has to be unnerving, but I can at least offer a little bit of comfort in the worst-case scenario employees would be facing had they been purchased by private equity firm ZelnickMedia. The short version: Almost everybody gets fired.
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.
My colleagues over at The Wall Street Journal have been able to convince more than a million people to pay for full access to the paper’s Web site. Can it find even more people who are willing to pay for even more online stuff? We may find out: WSJ.com is contemplating what sounds an awful lot like trade newsletters.
In the Microsoft-Yahoo saga, no news still constitutes news: Steve Ballmer still wants to do a search deal, but he still hasn’t talked to Carol Bartz about it yet. In other non-news: Ballmer doesn’t own anything made by Apple.
