Portfolio

The old online editor at Portfolio, Chris Jones, is joining the digital side of nytimes.com. The last time we heard from Mr. Jones, he was fleeing the increasingly encroaching presence of the business side at portfolio.com.  read more »

It's on the record now.

Condé Nast editorial director Tom Wallace gave the company's loudest and most forceful public support for Joanne Lipman, the editor of Portfolio. In a story in today's Women's Wear Daily written by Stephanie Smith, Wallace says the following: that the company "love[s]" Joanne Lipman; that she's an "ingenious" editor; that she's absolutely safe in her job; that the company is "extremely pleased" with the magazine.  read more »

An odd thing happened after Jacob Lewis was hired as Portfolio’s managing editor back in September: that wacky 17th floor at 4 Times Square, full of firings and bloody exits, began to calm down.

“When he came in, we had been in a period of start-up tumult, and he’s helped move us into the next phase,” said Kyle Pope, Portfolio’s articles editor.

“He’s made the trains run on time in some basic, fundamental way that as a start-up we were having problems with,” said Jesse Eisinger, a senior staff writer.  read more »

Howell Raines is back.

The former executive editor of the New York Times has written his first media column for Portfolio, and it's about—surprise!—the New York Times. It will appear in the April issue that hits newstands later this week. (Online this morning.)

The article, titled "Murdoch v. the Times," examines the paper's vulnerability, particularly in the wake of Rupert Murdoch's purchase of the Wall Street Journal.

"There is no more important question in American journalism than the future of the Times, and I don't think the newspaper or the journalistic profession is taking Murdoch in particular or the takeover issue in general seriously enough," he writes.  read more »

Last night, at Columbia's journalism school, Joanne Lipman said that three years ago she got a call from Si Newhouse. She met with him, had lunch, and loved the conversation so much she would have been perfectly satisfied with her life even if she'd been struck by a truck on her way out the door of his apartment building.  read more »

Jim Impoco, the former deputy editor of Portfolio, is heading back to his old home at The Times, where he’ll be a consulting editor at The New York Times Magazine.

Magazine editor Gerald Marzorati told Off the Record Mr.  read more »

Shortly after former Newsweek writer Dana Thomas signed a contract with Portfolio to become the latter magazine’s European editor, she celebrated with a “couple-thousand”-dollar shopping spree.

“The first thing I did after I got the job was go shopping, and I bought three new dresses and a pair of red boots,” she said. “They’re red suede boots and they go over the knee—they’re really hot.  read more »

Last week, Michael Kinsley arrived at 4 Times Square for a meeting with Portfolio editor Joanne Lipman and word of the meeting spread quickly through the building: Was he about to become the latest masthead addition to the monthly business magazine?

Not quite yet.

Mr. Kinsley told Media Mob that he was meeting with Ms. Lipman to give her a few pointers with how to run the magazine.  read more »

David Margolick is leaving Vanity Fair for Portfolio, Media Mob has learned. Margolick, who most recently wrote a profile of Eliot Spitzer, has been a contributing editor at Vanity Fair since 1996 and covered culture and politics there. He made his big bones in a long stint at The New York Times (for which he covered the O.J. Simpson trial).  read more »

A year after he first started interviewing, Dan Colarusso has the job he probably wishes he had taken in the first place.

Portfolio announced today that Colarusso, the former city editor of The New York Post, has been hired to run its Web site. Running Portfolio.com was the job Mr. Colarusso was interviewing for before he got bumped up from the Post's business editor to its city editor in Jan. 2007, said a source at Portfolio.  read more »

Media reporter--and Observer alumnus--Gabe Sherman is leaving Portfolio and joining The New Republic, WWD reports. He'll be covering the presidential campaign there, and he already has a piece about Mike Huckabee's combative relationship with the Arkansas press corps. While Sherman won't be a staff writer for Conde Nast anymore, he'll stay on as a contributing editor.

Chris Jones, Portfolio.com's managing editor, has resigned after clashing with Portfolio editor in chief Joanne Lipman over hiring decisions for the site, Women's Wear Daily reported this morning. Mr. Jones joins Jim Impoco--who was fired in August after also failing to see eye-to-eye with Ms. Lipman--as an early alum of the young business glossy .  read more »

Former New York Times reporter Kurt Eichenwald did not inform one of his editors at The Times that he suffered from memory loss. "Kurt never told me that he suffers from memory loss, and to the best of my knowledge he didn't tell any editor here," wrote Times business editor Larry Ingrassia--who oversaw Mr. Eichenwald's controversial child pornograpahy story--in an email to The Observer.

Mr. Eichenwald revealed in an interview today with NPR that he has long-term memory loss due to a battle with epilepsy.

Mr. Eichenwald did inform Portfolio editor-in-chief Joanne Lipman that he has memory disruptions, but only in one of their final conversations together, two sources said. He later resigned from the glossy magazine.

It's hard to evaluate the news coming from Keith Kelly's Media Ink column in The New York Post about Conde Nast chief Si Newhouse's Wednesday meeting with Joanne Lipman, editrix of Portfolio.

The splashy $100 million project is the object of some Schadenfreude, though the Schaden-part has always been difficult to pin down.  read more »

Leaner, better magazine—but firings, resignations and charges of indecision at the top have some staffers sounding mutinous.  read more »

Portfolio’s second issue hits newsstands on August 15, and there have now been two high-profile departures in the past four days alone.

Kurt Eichenwald, a senior writer and investigative reporter, has resigned, according to a source with knowledge of the situation.

For two decades, Mr. Eichenwald worked as an investigative reporter at the New York Times before joining the Conde Nast start-up in September 2006.

It was in Dec. 2005, while at The Times, that Mr. Eichenwald wrote an award-winning investigative piece on online child-pornography that continues to generate controversy. This past March, The Times revealed that Mr. Eichenwald paid $2,000 to the story’s subject Justin Berry—which although repaid, violated the paper’s ethics guidelines, according to executive editor Bill Keller. And two days ago, The Times reported that Mr. Eichenwald made additional payments totaling $1,100 to Mr. Berry via PayPal, under pseudonyms.

Back in February 2007, Mr. Eichenwald was very excited about his new position at Portfolio, telling The Observer that “very few startups have the kind of bankroll behind it that this one does."

Regarding the simultaneous print and online launch, he added: “Portfolio is a magazine being born in the 21st century. Any magazine coming out now cannot look at the Web as just something to put an article on; it has to be viewed as part of the whole.”

When contacted by The Observer today, Mr. Eichenwald declined to comment.

It’s been a tumultuous week over at 4 Times Square

On Tuesday, The Observer first reported on the firing of deputy editor Jim Impoco—regarded among staffers at the magazine’s number two, next to editor Joanne Lipman. The widely-admired Mr. Impoco brought in many of the magazine’s top staffers, and his firing occurred at a difficult moment, right as the magazine shifts to a monthly schedule.

Mr. Impoco was an advocate of an investigative piece on terrorism that Mr. Eichenwald wrote for the first issue, but which was held by Ms. Lipman.

Although Mr. Eichenwald wrote another piece for the forthcoming September issue, the terrorism story remains held. Several Portfolio staffers, who read the terrorism piece, praised it, and told The Observer that they did not know a specific reason why Ms. Lipman would not run it.

A Portfolio spokesperson had no comment.

UPDATE: Portfolio staffers now tell The Observer that was Mr. Eichenwald was on leave at the time of his resignation. A Portfolio spokesperson declined to comment on personnel matters. 

In the wake of Rupert Murdoch’s purchase of Dow Jones, another veteran Wall Street Journal reporter is leaving the paper to join Conde Nast’s Portfolio.

Scot Paltrow, a senior special writer for The Wall Street Journal, will join Portfolio as a contributing editor, starting Sept. 1.

He follows Peter Waldman there; the investigative features writer announced in July that he would be leaving the Journal for Portfolio after 22 years.  read more »

Peter Waldman, an investigative feature writer for The Wall Street Journal, is leaving the paper for a job at Portfolio.

Mr. Waldman, who is based in the paper’s San Francisco bureau, will begin at Portfolio in mid-August as a senior investigative writer. On Monday, he announced his decision to his colleagues via email.  read more »

Condé Nast's bulky Portfolio makes a lightweight debut.  read more »

Just weeks ago, Portfolio staffers could only communicate under double super secret background (Matt Cooper, natch).

But as this weekend's storm reached Biblical proportions in New York City--Genesis? Yikes!--came the first glimmer of Portfolio.com.

And now with today's print launch, the Conde Nast, no-talking-in-the-cafeteria gag order has been briefly lifted, letting in a gaggle of media reporters: Kit, Irin, Friedman, and Keith Kelly. Dylan is around, too, but only as a talking head for ABC News.

All this and there's not even a glitzy launch party to reward hard-working media reporters. Instead, the Portfolio gang will toast one another tonight at the Beaver Bar.