Portfolio - 2007 launch issue
The fall in advertising revenue for magazines in the US has led Condé Nast to draw in its horns. The New York Times reports that the upmarket publisher is cutting the number of issues that it publishes of both Portfolio and Men’s Vogue – in the latter’s case it’s left hanging on by a thread with just 2 issues a year instead of 10. As always in times of stress, the weaker brands are first to suffer and neither of these two is more than 3 years old. An attempt to launch Men in Vogue in the UK in the 1960s foundered.
Let’s hope the omens improve for the launch of Wired and the Pop-style fashion title scheduled fo the spring.
Magforum blog 
November 5, 2008 at 12:18 am |
Paul Keers (launch editor of GQ in the UK and co-founder of Axon) reminds me:
This is not the first time that a US mag making heroes out of Wall Street
suffered after a crash. Remember ‘Manhattan Inc’? Fabulous glossy which put people like Michael Milken, Saul Steinberg and other corporate raiders on the front cover – until the crash of 1989…
Of course, Conde Nast has a history of bad timing with business magazines – launching ‘Business’, in partnership with the FT, in March 1986! – and ‘Vanity Fair’ closed in 1935, a victim of the Great Depression, until it was revived in Feb 1983.
So essentially, with ‘Vanity Fair’, ‘Manhattan Inc’ and ‘Portfolio’, you have a magazine history of crashes in both senses!