Business media are rightly cynical about how many corporations spin bad news. So it's either funny or sad how failing business publications do the same thing.
Conde Nast announced that it is shutting down Portfolio, the Vanity Fair-type business magazine it launched with great hoopla two years ago. Editor in chief Joanne Lipman announced the news by telling staff how the magazine was "ahead of its business plan on various business metrics" and that it had won a lot of awards.
What Lipman did at the Wall Street Journal -- like creating the Weekend Journal -- was brilliant. But to paint Portfolio as an undeserving victim of falling ad revenues is PR talk . Portfolio was inconsistent, egocentric and overly glossy to the point that many executives didn't want to be seen with it. It hardly sold at the newsstand, and 20 percent of the 449,000 magazines out there were freebies.
Success is also killing PRWeek, which announced it will publish monthly and start charging people $198 a year to read articles on its web site.
"As our traffic has grown, our subscriber base has not," the trade's publishing director told the New York Times. "And our subscribers deserve the best content we have."
Given the competitive transparency of the PR world, chasing online readers away to get a few more that pay doesn't seem the best way to get your magazine's head above water.
But hey. I read Denver PR blog to find out what's going on anyway.
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