Dominique Browning wrote in The Times Magazine last weekend that her life went into a free fall after House & Garden was shuttered in 2007. She details how she spent much of her time in pajamas, how she thought about death, how she obsessed over eggs. She is turning her post-Condé tale into a book, which is due out in May. Meanwhile, Brandon Holley, who lost her editor in chief job when Jane folded three years ago, has landed at Yahoo, and riffed to The Times earlier this month about how the no-frills lifestyle on the Web isn’t much like life at 4 Times Square.   

So! We wondered how other victims of Mr. Newhouse’s golden machete were adapting to life after Condé. “It was definitely a tough experience,” said Pilar Guzman—the popular editor of the mom magazine Cookie, which folded in October—from her place in Park Slope. “I was the rookie who got to do it for five solid years without interruption. It was definitely rough having the rug pulled from under you.”

Ms. Guzman said she’s been concentrating her efforts on two pursuits: wrapping up a cookbook for Cookie and creating a Web site.

The Web site will be called momfilter.com, which she described as a lifestyle site for the modern mom. She’s looking for funding now, and is hoping for a launch date in the fall. She’s working on the site with Yolanda Edwards, another former Cookie editor.

She said she’s excited about the prospect of turning herself over to the Web, and said Cookie could have survived if Condé had invested significantly in the magazine’s Web site. “We had sort of a limited capability of what we could do online, as I’m sure you’re well aware,” she said.

And how has she taken to the transition from 4 Times Square to life at home in Park Slope? “I wasn’t Anna or Graydon, I rode the subway every day!” she said. “If you have your feet on the ground, then that fall from grace is not a fall from grace. It’s like a loss of any job.”

Deborah Needleman, the editor of Domino, which folded in January 2009, said she’s cooking up a Web site of her own with Ken Lerer, the chairman of the Huffington Post.
“It’s a commerce site—with a Domino-like sensibility—that makes it easy and pleasurable to decorate and shop for a home,” she wrote in an email.

(With all this talk about the Web, it’s also worth noting that Dana Goodyear, a writer for The New Yorker, is starting a Web venture with Jacob Lewis, the former managing editor of Portfolio.)

Ms. Needleman said she’s working on an illustrated decorating book with the artist Virginia Johnson for the Crown imprint Clarkson Potter, and she’s done some consulting work for media clients whom she’d rather not name (we’ve heard that she’s been doing some work helping out The Wall Street Journal). Her name has also been floated—by WWD—as a potential nominee to replace Stefano Tonchi as the editor of The Times’ T Magazine.

Joanne Lipman, the editor of Portfolio, lost her magazine nearly a year ago. And what has she been up to?

Ms. Lipman hasn’t landed on her feet yet, nor did she let on about any plans for a Web venture, but she’s made a few appearances on CNN’s Your Money and has written a pair of editorials for The Times, including one about women and the workplace. (The piece wasn’t much of a hit with some bloggers; Jezebel described it “as so ham-handed and contradictory, it read like a tutorial on How Not to Talk About Sexism.”)

Ms. Lipman emailed to say she’s turned down a few jobs and has taken to projects she’s found “interesting,” such as “advising one of the BusinessWeek bidders” and “advising news organizations on business coverage.” She wouldn’t elaborate.  

Ruth Reichl, who lost Gourmet last October, declined to comment for this story, but has been an active Twitterer, with daily food-and-drink-related updates!

During Tuesday’s monsoon, she tweeted, “Rain biblical. Scarlet glow of kimichi eggs. Potent tea, very black.”

(What’s with all this talk of eggs with these ex-Condé editors?)

Though PBS wants her to continue her show Gourmet’s Adventures With Ruth, there’s still no word on whether that’s actually coming back for a second season.

When we chatted with Ms. Reichl shortly after Gourmet folded, she said she had plans for a memoir about her years at Condé. “It’s a very rarefied world,” she said. “It was a world that most people—I had no idea that this particular world existed. I sort of think of it as ‘Ruthie in Wonderland.’ People are fascinated by the world. It’s a life that is probably coming to an end.”

Though Ms. Browning’s piece was light on the Condé Nast gossip, perhaps Ms. Reichl can fill the gap!

jkoblin@observer.com

American City Business Journals, which is operated by Condé Nast parent company Advance Publications, “has expressed real interest in taking it over,” according to a source.

But the relaunch wouldn’t come out of 4 Times Square: ACBJ is based in Charlotte, N.C. (is Big Business really leaving us for this Southern dame?), though the new portfolio.com would have a New York office.

Immediately after the magazine folded, Ad Age reported that ACBJ wanted to take portfolio.com over, but that earlier deal fell through.

If they get a green light, expect a very small staff to be working on it, including former portfolio.com staffers.

Eagle-eyed observers at 4 Times Square have been curious why portfolio.com continued to exist past the April 27 shutdown of Portfolio (unlike say, dominomag.com, which folded into the Architectural Digest Web site shortly after its print parent folded).

Speaking of Portfolio: There are still real estate opportunities on the 17th and 18th floor space at 4 Times Square that the magazine and Web team used to occupy.

The bridal magazines—Modern Bride and Elegant Bride—“desperately” want to catch the bouquet: They’re currently housed in the Condé Nast spillover space on Third Avenue.

The bridal magazines are likely to get the nod for the building over other Third Avenue tenants, W and Women’s Wear Daily—not because they’re favored but because the open space better fits their smaller staffs.

One Condé Naster told us that brides.com would move into Condé’s other spillover office on Sixth Avenue, which would free space at 750 Third Avenue that could then be subleased.

In March, Details and the Golf Digest Group moved into 4 Times Square from Third Avenue to take the space that belonged to Domino and Men’s Vogue, respectively.

A personal invitation from the venerable chairman of Condé Nast was unheard of in Ms. Lipman's world; she was excited.

When she got to his apartment, which is within spitting distance of the United Nations, he answered the door and she was struck by his total lack of pretension: he was wearing a tattered green New Yorker sweatshirt. The apartment was not an Architectural Digest showpiece (though it had a dramatic view of the United Nations building). No servant presented the lunch. Mr. Newhouse simply led her to the dining-room table where they sat down to eat.

Mr. Newhouse started immediately.

“Condé Nast is thinking about starting a business magazine,” he said. “What do you think?”

“Oh my God, yes!” she blurted out in response. “Not only should Condé Nast start this, but Condé Nast is the only company that should be starting this magazine.”

They spent the next two hours talking about a business magazine and what Condé Nast could do. Beautiful photos. Smart stories. A well-paid staff.

She wasn’t offered a job, and she had no immediate intention of leaving the Journal, but when she got out onto the street, she was walking on air. Trying to hail a cab in the rain, she thought to herself, I could be hit by a truck right now and I would die happy.

The conversation meant that much to her. After all, she just had the rapt attention of Si Newhouse—that inscrutable, mysterious, press-shy leader of Condé Nast. She had met him once years before, when she scored an interview with the famously reclusive press baron.

Even in 2005, she barely knew a soul at 4 Times Square—or for that matter, outside of the sometimes almost cultish confines of the Journal. Her resume could have been rendered in a stipple portrait.

She had dreamed since teenhood of an internship at the Journal. Not knowing much about business then was not a barrier to this fantasy: she loved writing, and whenever her father left an extra copy of the Journal laying around, she was awed by the writing in the front-page stories. 

She scored that internship, as a Yale undergraduate, and then got a reporting job there. From a daily column she jumped to the position of Page One editor, and she was involved in the creation of two special sections for the Journal: Weekend Journal and Personal Journal. 

She rose so fast that when the year 2007 started to loom—the year managing editor Paul Steiger would reach his mandatory retirement age of 65—her name was often spoken of in connection with his job.

It wasn't to be, though, because when she got back to her office in the World Financial Center in lower Manhattan, an email from Si was waiting for her.

“Let's do it,” it read.The magazine that resulted from that lunchtime chat closed its doors on Monday, April 27, some four years after that lunch at Mr. Newhouse's, or two years after the first issue of Portfolio, as the magazine was called, printed its first issue.

After 22 years at the Journal, and nearly four years with Condé Nast, Ms. Lipman has found herself not only without a title to edit, but fully without a job. She no longer works for Mr. Newhouse. The story Ms. Lipman told about a dozen staffers on Monday was that the magazine folded because the economy it was built to cover collapsed.

And that’s true, but it isn't the whole story.

WEEKS AFTER MS. LIPMAN WAS HIRED by Condé Nast in 2005, David Carr wrote in The New York Times about Condé’s new project and said, “Given that the company hired Joanne Lipman, the Wall Street Journal’s innovator in chief who helped conceptualize its Personal Journal and Weekend Journal sections, it will be a smart package, if nothing else.”

“Who could resist a chance to take part in the Last Great Magazine Launch?” asked Jim Impoco, who served as Ms. Lipman's No. 2 editor until he was fired in August of 2007. “It was a chance to work with tremendous talent. Working with Robert Priest was like taking a graduate course in magazine art direction.”

Early mock-ups of the magazine's cover obtained by the Observer, made over a year before its launch, displayed the perfect abstract representation of an unbeatable business magazine.

There: an intimate portrait of Rupert and Wendi Murdoch in a deep embrace—Rupert is wearing a black turtleneck, Wendi in a white sweater, the East River churning behind them in the background.

“Murdoch She Wrote” reads the coverline across the bottom of eight different cover designs with eight different titles. Then: “NEWS CORP. CEO’S WIFE HAS BIG PLANS FOR HIS COMPANY—AND THEY DON’T INCLUDE HIS KIDS.”

Wow. Seduction! Sex! Succession! Scandal!

What other imaginary headlines made up the unconscious dream of Portfolio?

“Gucci Gulps: Turmoil at The Fashion House.” “Fast Times at Morgan Stanley: Inside the Sex Harassment Scandal.” “Ipod Killer: Cell Phones Bite Apple.” “Terror Inc.: Corporate America’s Secret Ties to the CIA.” “Private Jets, For the Rest of Us.”

Names being tried out on this cover treatment included SCOOP, with the two O's blacked out to resemble nothing so much as a pair of boobs like the ones in the posters for the movie Amarcord; Advance (Hi, Si!); currency (note punctuation!); the file (once again!); liQuid (OK!); The File; and SPARK.

The make-believe stories were the perfect intersection of business with everything else, as Ms. Lipman liked to say. That is, business was never enough of a topic on its own for a story.

So how could it hold together a magazine?The appeal of these early dream-versions of Portfolio is rather obvious. Condé Nast gets to penetrate a mostly male ad market with a magazine that could sometimes look like a woman's magazine.

But even quite close to the launch, some insiders saw signs of trouble.

During a first interview with Ms. Lipman and a group of editors before the launch, one staffer was trying to get a sense of the magazine.

“None of them could clearly explain what the magazine would be. They just said ‘It’ll be really good, it’ll do what the other magazines don’t do. It’ll be Vanity Fair meets Fortune.’ But none of them had a clear idea or had an inspiring answer. I kept pressing them for a piece in another magazine that ran that they’d like to run and none of them had a good example.

When I asked what would be in the first issue, they were incredibly reticent.”

At the beginning it seemed to have a strange if untested sort of appeal.

Tina Brown, the former queen of Condé Nast (and someone familiar with losing one's magazine), wrote her Portfolio counterspin on the Daily Beast that she was disappointed to see Si Newhouse close down the magazine: “I think I was one of the few media snobs who liked the first Portfolio cover, an arty photograph of the New York skyline by Scott Peterman,” she wrote. “Even though experience told me it was not the kind of cover that would exactly leap off the newsstand, it showed vitality and sophistication. Love it or hate it, at least it wasn’t the usual portrait of some spruced-up suit peering over a high-concept prop that tends to be the solution of choice in publications aimed at the boys’ club sector.”

But Ms. Brown's assessment was rare: Ms. Lipman seldom caught a break for her work on Portfolio. As the magazine was launching, and Mr. Newhouse was lavishing money on her and her staff, bloggers stacked up the books beneath Ms. Lipman so her fall would be that much more dramatic to depict.

In fact, inside Condé Nast, a lot of Portfolio's apologists blame the demise of the magazine on Internet schadenfreude, a sure sign that their faith in the magazine's robustness was never very real to begin with.

Once the magazine was launched, its personality lurched in different directions. At first, only conceptual covers could be used. Then that was scrapped and the majority of the magazine’s cover stars were CEO's in power poses: Tim Geithner, Sumner Redstone ... Dov Charney?

Almost to a person, editors, writers and other staffers who worked with Ms. Lipman on the magazine, instead of rallying around her in her final days and toasting her ambitious and ultimately failed project, blamed many of the magazine's failures on her. Over and over, they cited a lack of vision for the magazine, the lack of a coherent sense of what the thing was as a whole.

“Joanne was never interested in ideas,” said Nancy Hass, who was hired to write the text of the prototype and who later signed a contract (that was eventually dropped) and who is married to Bob Roe, an editor who was fired from the magazine. “She would say things like, ‘Let’s do charticles!’ She wanted lots of those. That’s what she thought was an idea.”

“My criticism is that she didn’t have a strong vision,” said a current staffer. “She might have had a vision, but she didn’t have the courage of her conviction to carry it out. She was always buffeted by the last person she talked to.”

“You’ll hear from one corner of the world it didn’t work out as an editorial product,” said David Carey, a group president at Condé Nast who used to be the magazine’s publisher. “All of our evidence and data and from what we hear say the opposite.”

“The vision of the magazine has been consistent since day one,” Ms. Lipman said. “In fact, since the first meeting I had with Si, we set out to create a magazine with first-class narrative journalism that’s smart, substantive and has some sex appeal. Our DNA all along has been to be counter-intuitive.”

LAST YEAR, MS. LIPMAN WAS DESCRIBING HER halcyon Journal days to an audience at Columbia University.

“So Joe White is this brilliant Pulitzer Prize-winning automotive reporter in Detroit,” she was saying at a lecture, where she also first publicly described her luncheon with Mr. Newhouse. “I said, ‘Joe, what does your brother-in-law want to know?’ And he said, ‘My phone rings every day and everyone has the same question: My kid turned 17 and just got his license and I want to buy him a crappy used car, but I want to make sure it’s safe.’ And I said, ‘Fantastic! Write about it.’ And he did.”

“Similarly, Alexandra Peers, who covered art from a financial perspective, said ‘Everyone calls me and says ‘I want to start collecting art, but I have a really tight budget.’ And I said, ‘Fantastic, write about it.’ And those stories were the germ for what became Weekend Journal.”Now she was going to work for a glossy where news value took a backseat to magazine concepts, packaging, workshopping. Perplexingly, Ms. Lipman often discouraged beat reporting—the underlying product she so successfully packaged and sold to casual readers for the Journal—when she got to Portfolio.

“They were reluctant to ask anyone to pursue a beat,” said one staffer who had been with the magazine before its launch. “Even people with specific backgrounds were discouraged from developing a special area. They kept saying the writers should go with what they’re interested in and what they’re passionate about. It sounded good in theory, but you wound up having very fancy writers who were flailing around and spending their time trying to come up with something.”

When Portfolio did manage to break news, or break a perception about business into the mainstream, the magazine seemed incapable of capitalizing on the success.

A piece written by Jesse Eisinger in the April 2007 issue of Portfolio—headlined The $300 Trillion Time Bomb—was really first on the credit-default swap disaster. In the February 2008, John Cassidy profiled a world in which the government had to engage in massive bailout of the big banks.

“Our coverage has been prescient,” said Ms. Lipman. “In terms of the mission of the magazine, it has served us extremely well. What you have here is the right magazine at a very unfortunate time. The timing was bad—the timing in terms of the economy.”

And that wasn't just a problem for advertising—it became an editorial problem, too. Suddenly the magazine had to chronicle a completely different world, one no prelaunch workshop could have prepared them for, even as the collapse was itself predicted in the pages of Portfolio.

“At first we were all high-end, we were thought leaders,” said a staffer. “Early on, our stories were about the biggest house, the biggest hedge-fund member, or if you can only own one jet, what should you buy? All top luxury brands. Then we had to shift the magazine to: How fucked are we.”

Wouldn’t it be a downer to advertise in a magazine with Bernie Madoff on the cover? Ad pages dropped 60 percent--which readjusted is actually 46 percent after you consider they had one fewer issue—in the quarter and the title (magazine and web site included) lost close to $35 million last year, according to a person familiar with the title's finances.

Perhaps too much had changed since that lunch at Si Newhouse's place. Perhaps Condé Nast was no longer the right place for a business magazine—a magazine where banking is sexy and consumption is both topic and selling point.

“I love the magazine,” said Mr. Wallace, the company’s editorial director. “I think Joanne was the exact right editor for it. I’ve said this publicly already. She eventually surrounded herself with a great team. And she made the magazine that we wanted her to make.”

Perhaps that was the problem:  The magazine with the incredible staff and the luxury publisher and the important topic, after laboring for two years to brew the combination, suddenly found itself operating in high-altitude conditions.

“In the end,” Mr. Impoco said, “it was the big engine that couldn’t.”

Mr. Li said in an interview with The Observer this morning that he was only made aware of the news earlier today. When he walked through the lobby of 4 Times Square this morning at 7:45 a.m., he knew he had a meeting scheduled with the group president of Portfolio, David Carey, but he wasn’t aware of anything else.

The meeting involved Mr. Carey and senior management of Condé Nast (Mr. Li declined to say who specifically). As soon as he entered the room, he knew what it meant. “Times have changed and businesses need to make tough decisions,” he said. “I don’t blame them. Am I upset? Of course I’m upset. But I understand.”

"I feel terrible about it," said Mr. Carey, the magazine's first publisher who has since been promoted as the Condé Nast group President and oversees Mr. Li and the magazine. "I believe in this concept and I believe in this product. And I hear from enough people to know the impact it was making in the world, but to reconcile that knowledge with a very sober take on the business climate is a terrible feeling. I feel terrible for this loss and I've received a number of emails this morning from people and CEOs saying how much they enjoyed Portfolio. We had a very good thing going on the editorial front, but like anyone who launched a new business in 2006 or 2007 or made a major acquisiton in 2006, we're finding it's very tough to match the expectations at the launch to the reality of today."

Mr. Carey, likewise, said that he only found out this morning, but that he had a "strong sense" late last week that Condé Nast executives were coming close to pulling the plug.

He said that the magazine had through the end of 2010 to prove itself financially, but that with 18 months to go, it wasn't going to happen.

"The gap is too big from where we are now to where to need to be," he said.

Since Portfolio was effectively saved last October by the company—instead of folding the magazine, its publishing schedule was reduced to 10 issues a year, and it laid off almost the entire Web team—it has been open season on the magazine, and its editor, in particular within the building. Editors at other magazines grumbled to colleagues and friends that it was a wonder the magazine was still in business. Condé Nast staffers were left scratching their head as to why they had to make repeated expense cuts, yet Joanne Lipman’s first class air ticket to Davos was paid for by the company. When we asked Mr. Li about this, he strongly defended Ms. Lipman.

“She changed business journalism,” he said. “Portfolio changed business journalism. The whole idea of writing breathlessly glowing profiles of CEO, we didn’t play that game. And you know what, good for her. And good for John Cassidy and Jesse Eisinger,” he said, referring to the magazine's contributing editor and senior writer.

“I’m proud of the fact that in our first year we won a National Magazine award,” he continued. “Business Week and Fortune? Please, that never happened. We were just nominated for two Webbys!”

It's unclear right now whether staff will stay within the company—there is a plan to keep as many people as possible—though editor-in-chief Joanne Lipman is out at Condé Nast, according to one source. According to a Portfolio staffer, some have taken to toasting the news of the magazine's closure with a Stella Artois—the official beverage of magazine closings.

This story was updated at 1:05 p.m.

Edited by Joanne Lipman and launched to much hoopla in April 2007, the magazine went on to garner a National Magazine Award in 2008 for best magazine section as well as intense criticism for over-spending and its choice of coverage.

In October, The Observer's John Koblin reported that the magazine was forced to cut its staff by 20 percent and go from 12 issues a year to 10.

A call to a Condé Nast spokesperson for comment has yet to be returned. Updates will be posted as they are made available.

Update, 10:26 a.m.: Portfolio's Mixed Media blogger Jeff Bercovici confirms the news.

Update, 10:43 a.m.: Condé Nast Publications Group President David Carey sent the following statement:

Earlier today, Condé Nast announced, quite regrettably, that it is pulling back from its investment in Portfolio.

For this high-profile, 21-issue launch, the recession has helped and hurt the brand.  While the unprecedented nature of these times has made business and the economy the main topic of conversation, it has also led to high levels of uncertainty and a tremendous reduction in ad spend in the five key sectors Portfolio's business model depends on.

The company is deeply grateful to Portfolio's readers, for the support of its many friends in the advertising community who worked so closely with Joanne Lipman and William Li, and to the many journalists who keep such a keen interest in all things related to this introduction.

He wanted to say thank you! Not only did the magazine have a series of timely covers—Hank Paulson was on one, and they had a profile of AIG’s former chief Hank Greenberg coming down the pike—but it was responding fast on the Web, and its Web coverage was impressing everyone in the building.

“I have to tell you, fortune.com is working out brilliantly,” said Mr. Serwer, according to one former staffer.

After his opening remarks, he singled out individual Web writers for all their breaking news. For those exclusive enterprise stories on the Web. Those ticktocks, and those trenchant second-day stories.

The speech, staffers said, made the horse and cart of the print and the Web seem to chase each other around the maypole. Which is dominant? At any rate, the Web did matter.

Well, less than two months later, the Web team at Fortune has been all but disbanded. With Time Inc. under the gun to lay off 600 staffers, each magazine has had the burden of deciding who’s disposable.

Fortune decided the bulk of its editorial cuts would come from the Internet: There were roughly a half-dozen layoffs at the Web site, and now it’s left back in the hands of the good people at CNN Money, the parent Web site that fortune.com used to be folded into.

“It’s nothing now,” said one recently laid-off staffer. “There won’t be any more fortune.com original content in the near future.”

By all accounts, Mr. Serwer’s comments at that meeting were thoroughly genuine when made. But with cuts going down all over the industry, it appears a portion of the magazine world, which was never a quick adapter to the Web anyway, is responding by shoving their Web people right off the boat first. “You’re never going to get the traffic that really matters,” said one publisher at Condé Nast. “So it’s a traffic thing, but also, how do you monetize the traffic that you have? It’s impossible.”

The operating policy now, particularly at Condé Nast, basically reads: Revenue first! Future later.

And the printed page, the luxury object, is still where you find the money these days.

“The print reader’s worth a whole lot more [than the online reader],” said publisher Jann Wenner in an interview with Advertising Age last week.

“It’s never come up before,” said one senior editorial staffer who works at the Wenner Media empire. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone in my position or higher talk about the Web.”

And where it was talked about, it’s quickly being forgotten!

Portfolio, a magazine that had one of the boldest Web sites in the Condé Nast empire, let that experiment go two months ago when it dismissed 25 of the 30 people who worked full time and as freelancers for the magazine’s Web site.

And why? Partially to save the magazine.

The magazine lost close to $20 million this year, and with the magazine’s Web site losses also totaling in the millions, Condé Nast group president David Carey, along with Condé Nast editorial director Tom Wallace, played a large part in convincing Condé Nast chairman Si Newhouse and CEO Chuck Townsend to keep the magazine afloat at a reduced publishing schedule. But to essentially gut the Web site.

Across Condé Nast, publishers are making a calculation about the revenue of the present versus the promises of the future.

“We work in the high-end market,” said our Condé Nast source. “We’re going to stick to it and we might be the last one standing, but that’s our philosophy. The Web isn’t really a priority.”

And Condé Nast editors certainly remain focused on the printed product.

On Dec. 4, all-star editors Graydon Carter, David Remnick and Anna Wintour talked about why magazines would be just fine.

“I think we’ve been in difficult times before and we’ve come out of them and I’m sure that we will again,” said Ms. Wintour.

“If your magazine—or your company, whatever it is—has a point, it can do well in tough times,” said Mr. Carter.

The New York Times’ Joe Nocera burst out of his seat during a question-and-answer session and strongly disagreed with the editors and wondered how they could be so sanguine about the future of print.

“Joe, no!” said Mr. Remnick. “A, we’re not sanguine. Or blithe. We think about it all the time. There are meetings about it all the time. We’re each thinking about this. Constantly.”

And truth be told, Mr. Remnick is doing something about it!

In recent months, according to staffers, he’s finally taken to the Web and has been encouraging his endless stable of writers (and editors!) to start contributing to it. Mr. Remnick also hired Avi Zenilman, a former staffer at Web-savvy Politico, to start badgering writers into coming up with more ideas to write Web-only content.

On Dec. 16, George Packer wrote a takedown of Sean Penn’s cover story for The Nation on Hugo Chavez and Raul Castro. Mr. Packer’s post was bloggy in every way—dripping with sarcasm (“veteran foreign correspondent Sean Penn,” or, describing Christopher Hitchens as the “world-famous hedge-fund executive and philanthropist”), snarky and a pretty frank and vicious attack. And it even got a link on Romenesko—not exactly a familiar place for New Yorker stories.

Moving print and Web closer together—something that started happening at newspapers three years ago—is the direction some magazines appear to be taking.

At New York, the magazine’s online arm of the Intelligencer section, the Daily Intel, will start producing more material for the magazine’s section starting next year. The section is expected to be undergoing a remodeling where more and more Web-only content will be reconfigured or re-purposed for the magazine. Jesse Oxfeld, a senior editor who worked on the magazine’s Intelligencer section, was laid off due to the Web and magazine integration.

At Entertainment Weekly, there were five layoffs, including two editors, with the idea that there will be less editing—and more DIY from its writers!—but also more contributions from the magazine’s writers.

And at Forbes there have been massive layoffs from the Web side—including Forbes Auto and Forbes Traveler, as Gawker reported last month—with a full integration of the print and Web coming in the new year.

Meanwhile, looking back, it seems a surprise that the Web Staffs of the Magazine World ever felt their oats in the hidebound ink-and-paper industry.

In late September, around the time Fortune’s Andy Serwer gave the speech praising his Web staff, John Huey, Time Inc.’s editor in chief, sent out a memo to the staff of Fortune writers. Rumors were swirling that if Fortune writers didn’t start contributing to the Web, they could suffer penalties, like a docked paycheck.

“Although we certainly hope that everyone will see the dot com platform as a vibrant and exciting enhancement to the readers’ experience, we want to be clear that Guild-covered employees are not required to contribute to the Web sites as part of their jobs,” he wrote, “and will not suffer any negative impact as a result of not contributing.”

jkoblin@observer.com

Felix Gillette checks in with WNBC where an "upheaval began back in May, when NBC executives announced that they would be restructuring WNBC’s newsroom. As part of the transformation, NBC would be creating a new 24-hour local news channel, a revamped local news Web site and increased services for mobile news consumers."

How are business magazines responding to the financial crisis, wonders John Koblin. Portfolio editor Joanne Lipman says, “We’ve had more meetings... And one of the things we did is we made a list of every writer we had and what stories they’re working on, and asked how their pieces are relevant, and has the landscape changed in a way to reshape their stories.” Plus: Times’ Beijing Bureau Chief Takes On India.

Plus: Elizabeth Banks... Power Lunchers... Election Madness.

Readers of the November issue of Portfolio, Condé Nast’s lavishly produced business monthly, might well ask the question of their magazine’s cover star this month.

Of course, there wasn’t much time between the dark day when Lehman Brothers went all Cloverfield on American finance and the printer’s deadline for the magazine’s November issue.

But at Portfolio, as at most business magazines, it seems, the mood is less newsroom frenzy than quiet contemplation. And meetings.

“We’ve had more meetings,” said the magazine’s editor, Joanne Lipman. “And one of the things we did is we made a list of every writer we had and what stories they’re working on, and asked how their pieces are relevant, and has the landscape changed in a way to reshape their stories.”

The world that they’re covering is convulsing and you’d imagine that all hell is breaking loose on the 17th floor at 4 Times Square, but …

“It is a benefit to be a monthly,” Ms. Lipman said. “It’s been a major benefit—what we’re always trying to do is look ahead and we’re always thinking thematically, and that’s why we’ve been able to be ahead on the crisis. We’re not caught up in yesterday’s headlines and we’re thinking about what the impact is going forward.”

Operating between the screaming financial pundits on the two-headed cable-financial-news dragon of CNBC and Fox Business Network, who have to correct themselves on the Dow mid-sentence all day long, and the cool daily dispatches coming out of The Times, the Financial Times and The Wall Street Journal, it would seem time for the business magazine to step up and tell us what’s actually going to happen.

It’s probably a question whether the business magazines—which have for some time now only had to race for “gets” among CEOs who would agree to sit for smug, arms-crossed portraits, to be printed next to “how’d he do that?” Genius Profiles—have the metabolism to do that, especially on lead times stretching to weeks, in some cases.

But can anybody tell us what’s going to happen?

Two weeks after Lehman Brothers went under, a blown-up picture of Henry Paulson’s face, looking not so smug, was plastered across the cover of the biweekly Fortune with the cover line: “Paulson to the Rescue.” On Oct. 23, an image of former AIG CEO Hank Greenberg in sunglasses took the cover, weeks after AIG went down.

Fast work? Not so much. Mostly luck.

“We had those sticks in the fire already, which was great,” said Andy Serwer, the managing editor of Fortune. “That was something in the works for a while and it fell into place perfectly.”

Their most recent cover, on GE, was another feature story that was on their sked for months, and was reshaped just so that it could be used in the crisis as well.

Because, after all, weren’t all of the events that have happened since Sept. 15 somewhat … predictable?

Inside that Dov Charney issue of Portfolio, three stories in fact focused directly on the crisis. Two were columnist entries; but a third, on JPMorgan, had been assigned long before Lehman Brothers fell.

“We’re in a weird situation as a monthly—how much do you devote to this? And to this story?” said a Portfolio source. “People have other things on their mind, too, you know. It’s a question of balance.”

“There’s not a sense of urgency,” said another Portfolio staffer. “There’s no rip-up-the-magazine, all-hands-on-deck atmosphere.”

And what would it serve them, after all? Can the magazine commit to a broad analysis so soon into the crisis, when not everyone even agrees whether we’ve hit bottom yet?

Maybe in the next issue! Michael Lewis, the current superstar Portfolio contributor, is preparing a piece to run in the magazine’s December issue on Wall Street. The piece was assigned months ago as well, but now there’s time to make it really stand up and work for the magazine. Because once it’s finished, one of the country’s most important long-form financial journalists is packing his bags and moving upstairs to Vanity Fair.

At Fortune, Mr. Serwer said that he’s kept a news slot open in the magazine.

“It is the business world’s 9/11,” he said. “Nine-eleven was such a big story that there was nothing else going on. The first issue we didn’t write about anything else, in the next issue 95 percent about 9/11, and in the next issue 68 percent 9/11. And the same thing is happening here.”

When a Fortune writer was asked whether there was a breaking-news mentality around the magazine’s office, the staffer said: “What are you going to do? Run around and shriek? There’s not a sense of a pervasive crisis.”

“When you leave New York, it’s different—things feel more dire here,” said Mr. Serwer. “I was traveling in Arkansas, Texas and California, and a lot of people are concerned, but they are not concerned to the degree we are.”

Other features, generally tied in with long-committed ad agreements, have continued to run. In its Hank Greenberg issue, Fortune included its “Most Powerful Women” feature. In its Charney issue, Portfolio included a top 50 list of the world’s most generous billionaires. On Sept. 17, Forbes released its Forbes 400 issue of the world’s richest people. Certainly not a “Sept. 11” mentality.

And Forbes, a biweekly, is now at newsstands with a cover portrait of a man in a hard hat, which is a tie-in to their annual feature on the 200 Best Small Companies.

“If you look at the cover—it combines the elements of the best small-business review and a look at the economy and looks where we’re going,” said Bill Baldwin, Forbes’ editor.

He said the magazine’s next issue, which will hit newsstands on Oct. 24, will focus primarily on the crisis, including a six-page essay by Steve Forbes that he predicts will take off.

More so than the others, and probably by virtue of its format, BusinessWeek has been responding week to week with its cover stories.

“We’re not fundamentally a long-form feature magazine,” said Steve Adler, the editor of BusinessWeek. “We’re like a newsroom where we’ve scrambled everybody. We cover businesses and beats all over the world.”

jkoblin@observer.com

Mr. Lewis, who has been (and still is, at press time) on contract with The New York Times Magazine and Portfolio, had been wined and dined by magazine editors before. But this trip to Graydon Carter’s own private-public domain was a first.

And now, Mr. Lewis has given Vanity Fair an oral agreement that he will drop both of those contracts, and he will sign exclusively with them.

It’s an incredible get for Mr. Carter: Vanity Fair gets perhaps the most important financial journalist in the country to move from Conde Nast’s only financial title.

“In the pantheon of great narrative journalists, Michael Lewis is pretty much at the top,” Mr. Carter, who followed up that Waverly meal with an email exchange with Mr. Lewis, told The Observer in an interview for this article.

But it hasn’t been easy, not just because Mr. Lewis can have any job he wants, but because of something that happened over ten years ago.

In June 1997, the late Marjorie Williams wrote a brutal profile of journalism’s then-36-year-old golden boy Mr. Lewis for Vanity Fair which included an uncomfortably close examination of his love life, his journalistic practice, and his personality.

(Mr. Lewis did not respond to an email asking for an interview for this article.)

“The thing is, Michael, I think, had attitude about the magazine because of that,” Mr. Carter said. “I think I had to convince him that was then and this is now,” he added.

Apparently he did.

It’s not quite fair to pinpoint this most recent negotiation as the beginning of Mr. Lewis’ détente with Vanity Fair. Mr. Lewis agreed to write a piece for the July issue about Cuban baseball; Mr. Carter told The Observer that even then it was important to make the edit “a pleasant experience,” which for a writer might have included the 16,000 words of space he was allotted for an arguably offbeat topic.

“I don’t think he had been reading the magazine, but then he started reading it and he was surprised at how good the journalism was in it,” said Mr. Stumpf. “He was really complimentary.”

And since Vanity Fair wrote its 1997 profile, Mr. Lewis has only become a bigger star in journalism. His 2003 book Moneyball spent 18 weeks on the best-seller list and sold over 280,000 copies in hardcover and nearly 350,000 in paperback—in addition to altering the way fans watch the game of baseball. Count the walks!

And he’s settled down, marrying ’90s heartthrob and MTV News reporter Tabitha Soren later in 1997 and mining the relationship for material: His book about raising his three children (Home Game: An Accidental Guide to Fatherhood) is due on bookstore shelves in 2009.

So what about those editors he’s about to leave behind? Can The Times hold onto Mr. Lewis with its typical $30,000 story fee for its most cherished stars? What can Portfolio do to counter?

“As I understand it, Michael and Vanity Fair haven’t closed the deal yet,” New York Times Magazine editor Gerry Marzorati wrote to The Observer in an e-mail, “but I, of course, wish Michael well should it come to pass—we’ve worked together for a dozen years, he’s done so much memorable writing here, and my sense is he’ll still be writing for the Times Magazine from time to time. And I totally understand the move, should he make it—I think Graydon is offering not only a whopping contract but has agreed to buy up all Michael’s debt-swap derivatives.”

“Michael is a contributing editor for Portfolio and he’s continuing to work on pieces, and he has done a phenomenal job predicting the current crisis we’re in right now,” said Joanne Lipman, the editor of Porfolio.

It wouldn’t be totally unlike Mr. Lewis to be a tricky negotiator. Last year, according to the Condé Nast source, Mr. Lewis suggested to Ms. Lipman that he wasn’t going to return to Portfolio, but was eventually lured back after he was given more money.

And according to a Portfolio source, until Mr. Lewis brings pen to paper on his Vanity Fair contract, the magazine intends to start an aggressive campaign to retain him. But at Vanity Fair, the victory party has already begun. And Off the Record wondered: Does Mr. Carter consider Mr. Lewis a friend now?

“We’re not friends yet because I don’t know him that well,” Mr. Carter said. “But it would be very nice if we became friends.”

Related: Also! Graydon Nabs Mr. Blackhawk Down

jkoblin@observer.com

This is the first new site from The Slate Group, which was created in June and is overseen by Jacob Weisberg, the former editor of Slate. It encompasses the flagship site (which, amazingly, is on its second owner, third editor, and fourth presidential election since it was founded by Michael Kinsley for Microsoft in 1996), the video site Slate V, and The Root, a general-interest Web site aimed at African-American readers.

The sites occasionally share content, but function independently. Maybe they're not spinoffs after all: They're more like branches of Dick Wolf's Law & Order franchise.

It's certainly an interesting time to launch a business site. Phil Gramm may think the U.S. is in a "mental recession," but you don't have to be an economic adviser to a presidential candidate with seven homes to see that the paper is filled with reports of instability (Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac) or that the numbers on the gas pump are rising so high they threaten to roll over to zero like the score in an old Atari game. Isn't launching a site devoted to business in this environment sort of like putting out a level-headed, dispassionate newsletter about fire safety in the middle of a wildfire?

"The contrarian in me loves the idea of launching a business magazine in the middle of economic downtown," Jacob Weisberg told The Observer in a recent interview. Then again, with money, both big (Lehman Brothers) and small (The New York Times reported rising sales of lottery tickets last week) on people's minds, maybe it's not such a wild pitch.

Click image to enlarge.

"I can't remember a time when it had more urgency and relevance," Mr. Weisberg said.

On a recent visit to Newsweek's offices on 57th Street, The Big Money's editor James Ledbetter said that the site had been in the works for about a year. Mr. Ledbetter, a veteran of The Village Voice, where he was the Press Clips columnist in the days when media critics had to walk 10 miles uphill in the snow to get scoops (and they liked it!), and The Industry Standard, the dramatic flame-out of which he chronicled in the book Starving to Death on $200 Million, describes the relationship between The Big Money and its progenitor as "the difference between 'All Things Considered' and 'Marketplace': It's pretty seamless. They sound very much the same. The principle difference is in concentration and depth of coverage. There's only so much business coverage you can run on Slate before it's no longer Slate."

If that sounds a lot less sexy than, say, Portfolio, Condé Nast's business magazine that mixes articles on hand-built luxury cars in with its profiles of Barry Diller, that's entirely intentional.

"I don't think you'll see a lot of CEO fetishization on our site," Mr. Lebetter said. "That's not the approach."

He also cautions readers to look elsewhere for aspirational articles like "How to Polish Your Rolls Royce." (Mr. Ledbetter knows from Rolls Royces: In Starving to Death he writes about being chauffeured to an interview with Maxim founder Felix Dennis in the publisher's black Rolls.)

The Big Money, which was code named 'Slate B' before its launch and the purchase of its URL "for a modest amount," according to Mr. Ledbetter, gets its name from the third book in John Dos Passos' "U.S.A." trilogy. Mr. Ledbetter owns a first-edition copy of the book. (But we got to the reference first! The editors of this paper named the "Manhattan Transfers" real estate column after another Dos Passos novel. It's also worth noting that Mr. Ledbetter once worked for The Observer.)

Among the new site's features, which Mr. Ledbetter and his deputy editor Elinor Shields and staff reporter Chad Matlin previewed for a reporter a few days before launch, was an S.R.I. (Socially Responsible Investing) Stock Screener that allows users to track 500 top companies' commitments to the environment, gay and lesbian rights, labor and human rights, ties to the military, and "vice."

Mr. Ledbetter calls the S.R.I. Stock Screener "a constant background to what we're doing." Ms. Shields says the tool "will crack open data to users who will use it as they will." Despite its progressive criteria, Mr. Ledbetter insists that the tool—as well as The Big Money as a whole—is nonpolitical. "It's not a piece of advocacy. Someone can use this tool to find the least socially responsible and invest in those, which some of them choose to do."

"In general, I guess I would say I don't think that a left-right spectrum is useful way of looking at business journalism," Mr. Ledbetter added.

The Big Money will also feature downloadable PowerPoint spreads ("We Build Your Presentation"), a daily calendar of the day's big business events, a blog devoted to food-related topics called "Daily Bread" and another all about Google called "Feeling Lucky."

Google is something of a touchstone for the site, which launched with a co-bylined piece by Messrs. Ledbetter and Weisberg about the the lifestyle brands they termed "S.A.G.A."—Starbucks, Apple, Google, and Amazon—which Mr. Weisberg says are "four companies that everyone cares about."

"The goal is business journalism in real time," Mr. Weisberg said. "The cycle is so accelerated. There's a big gap on the one hand in the straight reporting and on the other hand, the historical business magazines who often seem outside of the business news cycle."

With The Big Money launching, Mr. Weisberg is spitballing sites with focuses on technology and women's interest, which he describes as fitting in the Slate Group's mode of being "very much pitched at the high end of the market. Not just demograpically, but intellectually." He says he hasn't green-lighted any ideas yet. But: "We're anticipating more. It's a little early to say."