Portfolio.com

» see portfolio.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Condé Nast published Vogue and Vanity Fair, and in the middle of the last decade it decided business deserved the same treatment: heavy paper and photography budgets that made chief executives look like film stars. Joanne Lipman was hired out of the Wall Street Journal, where she had spent 22 years, to edit it. The bankroll was reported at around $100 million and was supposed to cover several years of losses on the way to profit.

Condé Nast Portfolio arrived in April 2007 with its first issue dated May, and portfolio.com launched alongside it. Circulation reached roughly 450,000. The site was not a scan of the magazine; it ran its own reporting alongside interactive features, one of them a tracker called BizWatch that followed companies and executives across news sources, and the editorial operation behind both came to about a hundred people.

The timing was the problem. A magazine about the pleasures of capital launched eighteen months before Bear Stearns went under, and its subject matter turned from aspiration into autopsy while its advertisers, the investment banks and the luxury houses, stopped buying pages at the same time. On 27 April 2009 Condé Nast closed the magazine and laid off more than eighty people. It had run for two years.

The website did not close with it. Advance Publications owns Condé Nast and also owns American City Business Journals, the company behind the local business weeklies in several dozen American cities, so portfolio.com moved across the family rather than out of it and kept publishing.

~ the case file ~

~ the upstart years ~

ACBJ pointed the site at a different reader: the small and mid-sized business owner rather than the private equity partner. It kept the domain name for three more years, then rebranded in June 2012 as The Upstart Business Journal, aimed at startups and the people funding them, with J. Jennings Moss editing. The old portfolio.com address kept resolving into it.

None of this was ever aimed anywhere near me. A glossy American business monthly and then a startup blog for the American mid-market had no reason to reach an engineer in Ankara, and did not; whatever of it I read came one link at a time, when somebody quoted a piece. That is the shape of a publication whose proposition was partly about being seen carrying it through a particular set of office lobbies.

~ 15 november 2016 ~

Talking Biz News reported the end on 14 November 2016, for the following day. Whit Shaw, who ran ACBJ, put it in a sentence that is unusually honest for a shutdown quote: "Upstart was a content success but not a commercial success from an audience and revenue standpoint." Moss left the company. Three positions were eliminated. The Upstart name survived as a section inside the other business journals, which is the publishing equivalent of keeping the headstone and selling the plot.

~ where the address points now ~

Nine years on, the two halves have gone separate ways and neither one remembers. Type portfolio.com and you are redirected to app.portfolio.com, a live product behind a Cloudflare gate that has nothing to do with Condé Nast or with business journalism and simply happens to want the word. The Upstart subdomain at bizjournals.com redirects to a topic page listing startup stories. A hundred million dollars and two owners later, what is left at either address is the word itself.

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