Magazine Recession Watch: Portfolio Folds

Another magazine bites the dust. R.I.P. Portfolio. We hardly knew ye. Seriously. The only time I ever read Portfolio was to read David Margolick's work, because his stories are usually interesting and he was one of my professors in the fall (I blogged about an article he wrote on online gossip on Above The Law).

But for the most part, I didn't read Portfolio. So I was one of the many un-readers who contributed to its folding.

Employees found out today from the big guy at Condé Nast, S.I. Newhouse Jr. Word is that Wednesday is the last day for everyone on the magazine. Two days' notice. That sucks.

According to the NYT, the "upscale business publication," "failed to gain traction with advertisers and readers, in part because it was confronted by a historic recession in ad spending in its first few years of existence."

The magazine was just 2 years old.

There's nothing more depressing than watching magazines shutter their doors while one is in the midst of racking up debt to get a pricey degree in magazine writing.

Update: There's an excellent dissection of Portfolio's failure by James Ledbetter at Slate's The Big Money: Could Portfolio Have Survived?. And if you're curious, a little Google search leads me to believe that the Portfolio writer who refused to take his bet was likely Felix Salmon, who recently left Portfolio for Reuters.

Condé Nast Closes Portfolio Magazine [New York Times via Romenesko]
Conde Nast Closing 'Portfolio' [Portfolio.com]

Writings this week

My latest post on True/Slant is up, about U.S. News & World Report rankings for grad schools. Unfortunately, there is no ranking for journalism schools. So I can just pretend NYU is #1... at least within the confines of lower Manhattan.

I had fun with this story for Above The Law. It's a bit of a scoop, thanks to my being virtually the only journalist attendee at a privacy conference this week. It's about a Fordham Law class invading the privacy of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.

That's all for now, folks. Just one week left of this semester. Then the summer o' many jobs begins. More on that later.

Grad schools put in their place [True/Slant]
What Fordham Knows About Justice Scalia [Above The Law]

Magazine Recession Watch: GOOD is having issues... or rather, less issues.

As noted back in January, I recently resubscribed to GOOD, "a magazine for people who give a damn." In February, I received a "recession issue" -- a little brochure really -- explaining that GOOD was in difficult financial straits and would be pubbing online only that month. It did include a coupon for a manicure, but I think I lost it.

This month, I received a real issue. On transportation issues. I was distinctly underwhelmed. It's not that I don't give a damn. I love public transportation, but I just don't find it sexy. Ah well, I hope future issues bring more of what I love, like last year's Travel Issue, which sent one correspondent to Paraguay for drug-and-gun-running tourism.

But future issues will be far and few between. Folio reports that GOOD is scaling back to be a quarterly magazine. On the upside, subscriptions are up from 25,000 to 60,000 people.

Good Scales Back Frequency [Folio]

The Latest Journalistic Venture: True/Slant

A new online magazine "alpha" launched Wednesday, called True/Slant. Newspapers and magazines may be folding left and right, but the Web is the Wild West and there's still lots of land there for those who want to settle it. At least I hope so. I must admit that the rise and rapid fall of conservative online mag Culture11 scared me.

But I've signed on with the True/Slant team and I hope the Wall Street Journal's Walt Mossberg is right in predicting a bright future for the site. Here's a screenshot:


True/Slant bills itself as the "digital home for the 'New Journalist,'" and will make it easy for users to follow the stories and voices of individual writers. I think that's a cool idea, and I hope readers do too.

I'm a contributor on the site. You can check out my page, Degrees of Recession, about pursuing higher education when hiring prospects are bleak-- a subject with which I am intimately familiar. One of my first posts on the student loan movement going viral got lots of traffic (Thanks, Above The Law!), making me one of the most popular contributors this week. If you look closely at the screen grab above, you'll see that I'm just two pegs less popular than Matt Taibbi.


Which is awesome. As those who know me know, I'm a big fan of the vitriolic Rolling Stone writer.

True/Slant Tests Another Model Of Web Journalism [Wall Street Journal]
Culture Shock [Washington Monthly]

Pained Metaphors

Sometimes metaphors are painful because they are mixed, tortured, over-used, or overly elaborate. Like when a metaphor has as many references as there are characters on "Heroes," basically throwing in everything but the kitchen sink, then putting it all in a blender, followed by a trash compactor, and then dumping it all into landfill.

Get my drift? Maybe not. You may have lost your way upon those tortuous metaphoric paths. Metaphors should not distract from what is written about-- they should serve to illuminate ideas and make them clearer.

Packing in too much can cause the reader's mind to wander away from your point. In other instances of a metaphor gone wrong, the timing of the metaphor is just bad. So is the case with the current issue of the New Yorker (April 13, 2009). I opened it up to the first section, Talk of the Town. George Packer's Comment starts off the magazine with:

Another week, another earthquake.

My mind immediately went to Italy and the devastating quake that rocked the town of L'Aquila, outside of Rome, on Monday.

But no, Packer crafted this pre-Rome, and goes on in the column to talk about the new financial crises that President Obama is rocked with each week. The automobile industry takeover being the latest example.

I can't really absorb it though because I am still thinking about earthquakes, collapsing building, and post-natural disaster despair around the world. Whoops.

If You Want to Skip Journalism School...

I am at approximately the halfway point in my year-and-a-half long program at NYU's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. There's a month left in this semester. Then I am on "summer break" followed by the third and final semester of my master's degree program in magazine writing.

Hopefully, in January, there will be a job out there for me. Hopefully. Or at least editors willing to buy my stuff freelance.

I've been speaking to lots of prospective students in the past few months, about journalism, journalism school, and the graduate student experience at NYU. I'm generally positive about the decision to go to NYU (for myself and others). The professors (Ted Conover, Meryl Gordon, Lawrence Weschler, Rob Boynton, etc. etc.) are amazing-- I love getting to spend hours with them each week in class, having them read my work, and having ready access to them via office hours and e-mails. They're amazing people and journalists, and it's kind of mind-blowing to get to monopolize their time.

Other good things: my fellow students (especially my four favorites-- not naming names); not being in the job market right now; having an excuse to live in New York; and being the possessor of a master's degree by the end of the year.

So those are the positive things. These are the not-so-positive things: accumulating student loan debt; writing long pieces that don't get published (freelancing stinks right now); the ego deflation that is part of "being a student"; not being taken seriously by sources; and the fear that spending time getting a master's degree in a profession in which it is not required is silly.

Being a writer and editor at Above The Law helps balance out some of the negatives. I am fully engaged in the news cycle and it's good to be doing writing and reporting that's actually being read daily by people who need it.

A lot of journalism school is studying great pieces of non-fiction. I would likely be too lazy to do that systematically on my own. But if you're less lazy than me and want to simulate the journalism school experience, read the following:

The John McPhee reader. McPhee, a long time New Yorker writer, is the journalistic God to many of us in the craft.

Gay Talese magazine pieces, notably "Frank Sinatra Has A Cold."

The New Yorker

(If you live in New York) New York Magazine

The New York Times

Optional, but recommended: The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, Wired

Joan Didion

Ian Frazier. (Lawrence Weschler: "Frazier is the best journalist of my generation." And Weschler's work is pretty friggin' amazing.)

William Finnegan, notably Cold New World

The New New Journalism, by Rob Boynton. Interviewing, reporting, and writing techniques from the "new new journalists."

Joseph Mitchell, notably Up In The Old Hotel

David Foster Wallace, notably A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again

There's more, but I'm tired of typing. So, yeah, for a do-it-yourself-master's-degree-in-journalism, read all that stuff, and write/report a lot. Voila! I've saved you $40K or so.

Spring Break(!!!) Part Two: Berkeley, San Fran, and Napa.... and Founding One's Own Magazine

Well, spring break is starting to seem like a distant memory, but a fond one. I love California. Coming back to cold, rainy New York, I started to wonder why we don't all just pack our belongings and head west. But spring is beginning to bloom in the city that never sleeps and I am feeling happier.

Hmmm.... to quickly sum up Berkeley/Northern California: running past cows at Inspiration Point, running past strangely gopher-like squirrels at the Berkeley Marina, running past students on Berkeley's campus (I ran a lot over spring break), inadvertently watching burlesque at El Rio in The Mission, hiking in Napa Valley (photo at right), and thrift store vintage apparel shopping in Santa Cruz.

Upon my return to New York, I saw this article in the Times: Do-It-Yourself Magazines, Cheaply Slick . It's a California-based (of course) service that allows users to self-publish magazines:

With a new Web service called MagCloud, Hewlett-Packard hopes to make it easier and cheaper to crank out a magazine than running photocopies at the local copy shop.

Charging 20 cents a page, paid only when a customer orders a copy, H.P. dreams of turning MagCloud into vanity publishing’s equivalent of YouTube. The company, a leading maker of computers and printers, envisions people using their PCs to develop quick magazines commemorating their daughter’s volleyball season or chronicling the intricacies of the Arizona cactus business.

NYU should probably have a course on this at the Journalism Institute, since it's how we grad students may be most likely to see our words on the printed page.

Speaking of, yet another magazine has announced it's ceasing "real" publication, though it will live on in Web form. R.I.P. Blender. I kind of loved the US-Weeklified-Rolling-Stone imitator.

Do-It-Yourself Magazines, Cheaply Slick [New York Times]
Print Version of Blender Magazine Will Cease Publication [New York Times]