Did Si Newhouse 'Rip Up' Portfolio?
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.
We've done a bit of it: click here to read Michael Calderone on the topic. Past issues have seen stories get killed, reskedded and reorganized, and cover stories changed late in production, without the need for Mr. Newhouse's intervention. But this Wednesday meeting, the length and unusualness of which unnamed insiders who talked to Mr. Kelly seem to disagree on, has resulted in a "flurry of Newhouse dictated changes." But what were they?
[One] insider insisted the changes amount to only "tweaks" to headlines and captions, as well as changes to the color on the cover. The cover topic was not changed.
And yet there must be some significant last-minute changes, since staffers are expected to be closing this issue right up until its drop-dead with the printer today. "It seems like we've been closing the magazine for three weeks," one source "grumbled" to Mr. Kelly.
