Condé Nast's Portfolio debuts, at last, and tips the scales at 332 pages

Condé Nast has finally, after almost two years gestation, launched Portfolio, a fat (332 pages, 185 pages of ads) and glossy business magazine cousin to Vogue and Vanity Fair. According to a story in the New York Times, the chairman of Condé Nast, S.I. Newhouse, is bullish on the business publishing category and impatient with the many sceptics who have wondered whether the idea would fly.

“Damn the torpedoes and full speed ahead,” he said. “I don’t think we’re going to trample on Forbes or Fortune. I think we’re going to help the whole field. We’re going to bring excitement to it, and we’re going to bring luxury and fashion advertisers into it.”

Joanne Lipman, the editor of Portfolio was formerly of The Wall Street Journal, where she had overseen its Weekend Journal and Personal Journal sections and its Saturday paper. “Business is about power,” Ms. Lipman writes in her first editor’s letter. “And guts. And passion. Business coverage should be too.”

The new magazine debuts while some of its major competitors aren't performing in stellar fashion: and 13 % for Fortune, compared with the same period a year ago, according to Publishers Information Bureau. Circulation for those big three has been flat or falling for the last few years, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations. However, as the NYT points out, Portfolio would not be the first business magazine introduced during trying times -- Henry Luce founded Fortune just months after the Wall Street crash of 1929.

Mr. Newhouse said that his reported commitment to the magazine of more than $100 million over the next five years was “something of a myth” because “we’re going to stay with Portfolio.”

Portfolio has hired more than 75 editorial people for the magazine, 40 for its Web site, www.portfolio.com, and more than 45 on the business side.

The business side, under Mr. Carey, the former publisher of The New Yorker, has been working Madison Avenue hard. After all, he has a reputation to uphold. During his tenure at The New Yorker, between 1998 and 2005, advertising revenue almost doubled and the magazine broke the 1 million mark in circulation. In 1996, Mr. Carey brought 210 ad pages to the first issue of the restarted House and Garden, one of the highest levels ever for a new magazine.

Portfolio’s first issue has drawn 53 business advertisers, 30 of which had rarely if ever advertised in a Condé Nast publication. The newcomers include Barclays and Pitney Bowes.

[UPDATE: The Financial Times (London) makes a few arch cracks about the new magazine: "Sometimes the mix seems more Heat magazine does finance, than Vogue meets business."]

[Just caught up with the New York magazine interview with Joanne Lipman the week before the launch.

"With a reported budget of $125 million, it’s the most expensive launch Condé Nast has ever done. And given the trend of advertising moving from print to the Web, it’s possibly the last brand-new, big-time journalistically ambitious magazine ever."]