Hello Nast-e, How You Been? In the "great" tradition of The Devil Wears Prada, Erik Maza reports on yet another bit of roman à clef that has emerged from the former innards of Conde Nast. Okay, so: Karl Taro Greenfeld's forthcoming (and very hyped!)  Triburbia isn't exactly mass-market paperback fodder, but there is a bit about a Conde Nast magazine that "didn’t survive very long in the digital age." The context provided and Maza's guesswork lead him (and us) to believe it's based on one Joanne Lipman of long-deceased Portfolio where Greenfield once worked. Portfolio famously blew a bunch of cash and its failure was like a really highbrow and way more expensive version of any one of Radar's three failures with far less drug use and more Michael Lewis and Felix Salmon. Also, Jeff Bercovici will probably never work at Conde Nast again for the wonderful media reporting he did (on Conde Nast; attaboy!) when he was there. Anyway, Maza hysterically called up Joanne Lipman who didn't comment on the book because she hasn't read it, but more importantly, we now know that Lipman is writing a book about her childhood music teacher instead of a Conde Nast tell-all. [Memo Pad / WWD]

Ghostface Dillah! IAC chairman Barry Diller was on the company's earnings call today when Peter Kafka heard him talking crazy-talk: A print-less Newsweek? Never! But: Not entirely unlikely! [All Things D] 

Nahoo: Welcome back to the media headlines for a day, Jamie Mottram, who previously oversaw Yahoo's whole blog experiment thing, who is now going to USA Today's Sports Media Group. Onward and lateral-ward! [Fishbowl NY]

On The Upside, You Get Marion Berry As Your Mayor: Have you thought about leaving New York City for higher ground lately? Tired of the Gotham grind? Well, D.C. news/gossip/scuttlebutt sheet The Hill has released their 50 Most Beautiful People list for this year, and it's as good a argument against it as anything else, especially if you've vaguely considered moving to D.C. (and let's face it: if you in fact have vaguely considered moving there, you deserve whatever fate awaits you). Also, tawdry mid-summer feature experts that we are, could you pick a worse way to shamelessly paginate, as a deterrent to reading through the entire thing? In D.C., no, because everyone there buys into things like this, as opposed to only a fraction of bored New Yorkers when we do them. [The Hill]

Someone Only She Knows: Remember what Maureen Dowd was like when she was an entirely respectable and hard-nosed reporter, before she pioneered the art of the hard-sell headline (long before The Internet—and TimesSelect—was ever a thing)? Of course you don't, because none of us were alive and if we were we didn't know who Maureen Dowd was yet because she was still an entirely respectable and hard-nosed reporter. Well, now you can relive those glory days. The Awl has a feature on it. [The Awl]

Outliars: Did Malcom Gladwell cause the recession? No, but it's fun to imagine him doing so because he once lectured at Lehman Brothers. Also: Wouldn't he just love  that? In even asking the question, Andrew Sullivan gives Malcolm Gladwell way, way, way too much credit today, while Felix Salmon gives him way too much space to defend himself of this accusation. All of which goes without saying: We all know Jim Cramer caused the recession, anyway. [Andrew Sullivan, Felix Salmon]

And The Pulitzer for Pattinson Service Goes To: The most groundbreaking thing happening in journalism today has to do with Kristen Stewart cheating on Robert Pattinson. This is like Watergate (for our angsty teenage cousin). It's literally inescapable on any social media platform right now. Congratulations, US Weekly, you've officially pushed VICE out of the "obligatory esoteric ASME nomination" position for next year's awards. [US Weekly]

Please remember to send your tips, legal threats, pencil sketches of funny dog breeds, and pro-bono accounting advice right here.

Happy Wednesday.

fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek

Our takeaway is of course the "silly questions" closer, when Lipman was asked about Conan O'Brien.

"I hate to say it, but I think that the best publicity he ever got was for being fired, and I think he's peaked."

Lipman is best known for running the very expensive and very short-lived Conde Nast Portfolio, and penning an essay about sexism in the magazine industry for The New York Times six months after Porfolio closed. It was not good publicity and sparked a non-stop snark-fest.

Isn't anyone with Jojo?

kstoeffel@observer.com :: @kstoeffel

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

MarketWatch's Jon Friedman mentions Joanne Lipman as one of the leading candidates. Her name has indeed been floating around in the week since the sale: Norm Pearlstine, the chief content officer at Bloomberg, is a fan of Lipman's from back in the day at The Wall Street Journal, and she was in charge of another high-profile business magazine--Portfolio, which, as Friedman delicately puts it, "Conde Nast stopped publishing a few months ago."

When Portfolio was born in 2005, it was "the Last Great Magazine Launch" and Lipman was a rising star. But when John Koblin did a post-mortem this spring, after the magazine had published its final issue, many staffers raised questions about the role her leadership played in its demise:

“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.”

Of course, there were also larger forces at work:

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.

Whether it's Lipman or someone else, BusinessWeek's new editor will have to build a magazine to cover a very different economy.

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.

“It’s the one part of our bodies that cannot be affected by Botox!” Ms. Wells told a group of women seated around a large square table covered in a pink tablecloth who were crunching on lightly dressed lettuce leaves. 

“I think we always pay attention to what’s immediately important and it’s usually superficial things—the way we look, our hair, our wrinkles, and we forget to pay attention to our hearts,” Ms. Wells told the Transom. “I go to my spin class almost every day. It’s really fun! We’re all addicted to it, I think.”

But according to Ms. Wells, the classes are not about competition for her and her high-profile friends. “Our classes are candlelit so you can’t look around at everybody even if you wanted to,” she said.

Ms. Rosenthal, dressed in a belted gray dress and a purple cardigan, said that her favorite class is Gospel Spin with an instructor named “Derryl.” (Hallelujah!) But the classes aren’t exactly conducive to gossiping.

“No, you can’t talk! You just close your eyes and spin as fast as you can,” said Ms. Rosenthal. “The competition is only about how sweaty we are afterward and it’s usually a toss-up. And you probably wouldn’t want to get close enough to actually check.”

The Transom was also curious about the ladies’ Valentine’s Day plans.

“Jeff and I usually do something with all the kids. We take them out to an early 5 o’clock pasta dinner at Serafina, which is my kids’ favorite,” said Ms. Zucker. “And we give them little heart candy.” (The Zuckers are waiting for their 12th wedding anniversary in June to exchange gifts.)

Over in the corner, the leggy Portfolio editor Joanne Lipman, dressed in Chanel, was catching up with Ms. Wells.

“Well, I’ve been married for a really long time so …” said Ms. Lipman, breaking into a giggle. “We just stay home and hang out with our kids and sometimes they cook for us. But everything is fine with me. Ordering out, takeout, whatever.”

ialeksander@observer.com

"Eyebrows were raised last week when Portfolio editor Joanne Lipman—not known for her modesty—not only insisted on attending the World Economic Forum in Davos but demanded to fly to Switzerland first class. 'It's just jaw-dropping,' an insider said. 'Not only is her magazine not profitable, but she just laid off almost the entire Web site and fired many others on the print side.'"— Richard Johnson, et. al., Porfolio's First-Class Folly, The New York Post, February 2, 2009.