Magazine Death Pool

For Your Consideration: Doubledown Media

1. The gravy train is over. The stock market is tanking worse than the buzz on M. Night Shyamalan's movie opening up this Friday, Bear Stearns was bought for a dime, and other brokerages like Lehman are teetering. Merrill Lynch is raising billions in capital to make up for shortfalls. The high rollers are being laid off in droves and, whoops, there goes the audience that Doubledown has counted on.

2. Lawsuits cost money. Doubledown Media rode the press coverage for about five minutes about publishing former Met Lenny Dykstra's custom magazine for former athletes. Then they fell out of love about shirking contractual responsibilties, pointed a lot of fingers, and counter-lawsuits were filed. Number one argument among couples is money! Dykstra took his bag of baseballs to American Express, and now both parties are filling up Keith Kelly's column with accusations.

3. Freelancers are not being paid.

Put it all together and the Reaper is seeing this stock being taken "off the Big Board." Something has to give, so watch for at least one of Doubledown's properties to be de-listed.

ODDS OF SURVIVAL: 25%

"Uncontacted" Amazon tribe photographed after subscription blow-in air drop

In this image made available to the Grim Reaper, showing "uncontacted Indians" of the Envira, who have never had contact with the outside world.

They are reacting angrily to an airplane rented by Conde Nast Publications dropping cheap subscription blow-in cards to Portfolio magazine in an desperate effort to drive up subscription numbers for the next circulation audit.

"We knew that this tribe had no idea about the editorial musical chairs at our magazine or the fact that nobody is reading it in the United States," says a source close to the publisher. "We are hoping they'll be early adopters in learning about a lot of high end fashion advertisers and Wall Street blowhards nobody else seems to care about."



About three dozen highly poisonous arrows were shot at the low-flying aircraft after the subscription blow-in cards were dropped across their wooden huts.

The tribe began shouting at the plane. An uncontacted tribes expert translated the cries as "Go home big winged bird with evil news!"

Portfolio receives the kiss of death from Mr. Magazine

Today, Samir Husni, the self proclaimed "Mr. Magazine" from the University of Mississippi, declared Portfolio magazine as his "most notable launch of 2007," practically guaranteeing  the publication's demise at some point before the end of this decade.

You can tell Professor Husni is serious about determining this noble honor, as the very first criteria he lists for winning it is: "How much publicity did the magazine generate?"

Ah, but the professor does provide a disclaimer: "When you read the word notable it may mean several things to you; however, for me, notable does not refer to 'probability of success.' Many notable magazines of past guides have faded from the newsstands or fallen into obscurity."

To which the Reaper asks, then why even bother making a "notable" list, if not to provide an audition list for my good work? You may as well collect 30 magazines at the newsstand that weren't there last year and declare them candidates.

The Reaper bets that runner up Hot Wheels magazine lasts longer than Portfolio.

Hell's Bells: they're starting to ring a little more for Portfolio

According to today's WWD, in some not surprising news at all, it was revealed that Portfolio magazine is selling through 15%-18% of its newsstand copies. That's several percentage points lower than what would be considered "respectable."

The article also cites that the magazine has 300,000 subscribers and that most business magazines are subscription-driven. Yes, but where do those subscriptions come from and how much did people pay for them, asks the Reaper? A large amount of them must come from starter offers which come cheap, mostly through an expensive direct mail campaign. The other point to keep in mind is how long are these people going to stay subscribers? Their cheap subscription deal is over by next spring, so it's time to pony up more bucks to renew. That will be one of the biggest crossroads that Portfolio will face, will current readers like it enough to subscribe again?

The Reaper has often stated that Portfolio will follow in Cargo's footsteps and drop right down here in the permanent underground parking lot. It won't happen right away, but it will happen over the next 16-18 months, when the readership is a stack of cards and advertisers abandon ship. David Carey can boast all he wants about ad pages now while he's under Si Newhouse's golden glow, but the magic will not be there in the long run.

Portfolio still living on smoke and mirrors until the circ numbers come out

Today's New York Post gives a very wide berth for Portfolio Publisher David Carey to post about the large amount of ads the magazine is getting, although the number is getting lower and lower each month.

While it's been well documented that the ad sales people have been doing their job and editorial people are abandoning ship, there's that little area of concern called circulation. It's an area Carey doesn't address this time out because it backfired on him when he boasted the first issue sold out (and we all know that was far from reality).

To borrow the financial terms of this magazine, the Reaper is short-selling Portfolio for the long run once the newsstand numbers start appearing. We shall see if the readers will continue to be there to support this beast, because if they don't, those ad page numbers will be dropping a lot steeper.

Business 2.0: RIP 1998 - 2007

The "next disruptors" include the Reaper, which came late last night to take away the much-missed, but bound to end Business 2.0. Before the Reaper went off to get a dirt tan in foreign climes, I wrote about the magazine being on the edge and perhaps shuffled into a section of Fortune magazine.

Despite Mansueto Ventures' best efforts to buy it to put along side its own prime death candidate, Fast Company, Time Inc. decided it would rather close than sell.

The Reaper understands why because I'm sure my hunch is correct -- as predicted, several Business 2.0 editorial staff will join Fortune and its web site. When you've got a brand name as good as Business 2.0, you're not giving it up so fast, whether it will be in Fortune magazine, its own web site, or both. Time Inc. now has a little less debt for shareholders.

Feeling refreshed after vacation, the Reaper now has plenty of time to learn to run its digital business, hedge on valuable domain names like www.business2isdead.com, and find out when the starting time for Web 3.0 will be. We'll be playing Death Cab for Cutie on the boat ride for this one.

Business 2.0: Close to the edge....

Next week, the fate of Business 2.0 will become public. A mere coincidence that it will happen during the absolute quietest week of the summer, when most of the free world is away on vacation? I would say that is not a good sign. People like to deliver bad news when nobody's around.

Even the Reaper is not going to be around. As you may imagine, it's a lot hotter down here than up there, so we need a little time to kick back in a cooler climate, somewhere where there is no water, so trust me, no cruises.

I am anticipating Business 2.0 being taken off life support and for Time Inc. to do the corporate thing -- announce that it will become a web-only property, part of their much-maligned "digital strategy." It may be its own playground, or using one of publishing's famous stand-bys, become "part of another site" or "a section in another one of our magazines" (i.e. Fortune). If you've been around long enough, you've seen this game before.

Advertising Age Gets It Half Right This Week

The Reaper has been saying for quite a long time that both Business 2.0 and Fast Company are prime candidates for the scythe. The issues have been razor-thin for a long time, circulation is faltering, and they make better web sites.

This week's Advertising Age agrees with the Reaper, citing all kinds of scary numbers, and then letting Fast Company editor-in-chief Robert Safian defend his magazine, while burying them with experts from Horizon Media and Starcom.

However, the rest of the article is so misguided that the Reaper just has to speak up here, as to who will live and die.

As if announcing burial rites for Business 2.0 and Fast Company wasn't enough, and proclaiming "Category Crowding Could Spell Death For Some Business Mags" sends them to an even quicker death, Ad Age drags in Money and Smart Money as other titles facing imminent death and calls them, get this, "Little Guys." And to drive home the point that all of these magazines are one and the same, they published the artwork below.

Besides the fact that Money and Smart Money are the #1 and #2 titles in the personal finance category,  Money has a paid circulation of nearly 2 million and  Smart Money has 800,000. Not only are they not going anywhere right now and have strong digital extensions, they are far from "little guys."

If anybody is a likely candidate to fold in the personal finance category, it's going to be the #3 title that just laid off its entire sales force, Kiplingers Personal Finance magazine, which the Reaper noted a short time ago.

Portfolio's publisher hasn't been to the newsstand lately

If a magazine named Portfolio drops on the newsstand, will anybody be around to read it?

Portfolio publisher David Carey seems to think so. In Jon Friedman's column in which he proclaims the magazine "a dud," Carey says this rather stand-out defense: "We can't keep the newsstands replenished in New York and Chicago."

Talk about setting yourself up.

I don't know what newsstands Carey has been visiting lately -- perhaps there aren't many above 110th Street that stock Portfolio -- but the Reaper has yet to walk into a newsstand that hasn't had multiple copies of Portfolio sitting in a stack. Stroll into Grand Central -- they're all over the place.

You can't make people read a magazine they don't want. And even if Jon Friedman calls it a dud -- after breathlessly saying people will be talking about the "AP Era (After Portfolio)" just a mere 10 days or so ago, you know Conde Nast has got its work cut out for it.

Mark my words, the Reaper knows that this one will be going down in no more than two years.

Ignore the Portfolio hype... it'll get here eventually

And so begins the long path to the Reaper's door for Portfolio.

As predicted, we've seen the grinning pictures of the editor and publisher. We've seen references to the big page count. We've seen the amounts of money being thrown around that could easily save thousands of starving children in Africa (or a worthwhile magazine). The journalists have come drooling, and Jon Friedman can't stop himself from declaring the "Before Portfolio" and "After Portfolio" eras because he's enraptured by business magazines.

It won't mean a damn thing in two or three years when they can't capture enough readers to keep this white elephant alive and they fold it but keep the web site open (of course).