Conde Nast cuts back Men's Vogue, Portfolio

LOS ANGELES - Conde Nast Publications, a unit of privately held Advance Publications Inc., said Thursday it would publish fewer issues of Men's Vogue and Conde Nast Portfolio to save costs in a worsening advertising market.

The cuts are part of a roughly 5 percent reduction companywide that will affect editorial, sales and other back-of-house staff.

Men's Vogue will be published in the spring and fall, down from 10 times a year, and be absorbed into Vogue. Portfolio will be published 10 times annually, down from 12. Sales and back-of-house functions at Portfolio.com will be absorbed by Wired.com.

"This business decision is a byproduct of the economy and we're adjusting our operating expenses accordingly," said Portfolio spokeswoman Perri Dorset.

The number of staff affected was not immediately clear. Men's Vogue will publish regularly until the December-January issue, while Portfolio will publish a combined December-January issue and a July-August issue starting this winter.

The announcement came after the company said in July it was shutting down its Golf For Women magazine after 20 years.

On Tuesday, Time Warner Inc.'s publishing unit announced cuts at such magazines as People and Sports Illustrated that are reported to affect 6 percent of the unit's staff, or 600 positions.

The damage from the economic meltdown is affecting the whole journalism industry, not just newspapers, experts said.

"It's a surprise in some ways for Conde Nast, which has been the premiere magazine company in the U.S. for a long time," said John Fennell, a professor of magazine journalism at the University of Missouri. "Everybody's running a bit scared."

"It's going to take a couple of years ... to learn whether some of these losses are cyclical or whether they're permanent," said Roy Peter Clark, senior scholar at the Poynter Institute, a school for journalists. "Until then, I think you're going to see all such institutions exercising as much fiscal discipline as possible. You just hope that they can do it without hurting the product and perhaps driving away readers."

Conde Nast also publishes The New Yorker, Vanity Fair and GQ.

Average circulation for Men's Vogue, which launched in September 2005, was 368,898 in the first half of the year, according to figures the magazine submitted to the Audit Bureau of Circulations. In the year-ago period, it was 307,501.

For Conde Nast Portfolio, average circulation in the first half of the year was 415,292, up from 376,618 in November. It launched in April 2007.

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