Another dead magazine. They’ll blame the advertising environment, the economy, the bubble. But let’s get real: what brought Portfolio down was Portfolio. Here’s why:

1.   Saturation:  The first chart they show you in a b-school is a 2×2 of size v. saturation. Big unsaturated markets are where opportunity lives. Small unsaturated markets are where nichemakers rise. But big and small saturated markets are a waste of time—without marketing or disruptive innovation. Portfolio had neither. In magazines, “editorial” IS brand marketing, but when the editorial lacks positioning, it’s the same thing as torching money. And as for disruptive innovation—what’s the opposite of disruptive innovation? Conformism, imitation, similarity, an editorial idea unrelated to digital life, to a working business model, or to meaningful differentiation. Why bother? Readers didn’t. Advertisers didn’t.

2. Fragmentation: Trying to cap a fragmented media market with generalist coverage is either very bold or very foolish. You pick.

3. Print. D’oh. I still think it can be done, but not without a compelling digital strategy that would rethink the role of narrative journalism.  There was zero effort to do that here.

4. Money. What’s the ROI on a 600-day-launch prep, $4/word stories, $150,000+ contracts, $200,000+ editors, and no digital strategy? Can $100 millon launches really break even in this economy? Unlikely.

5. Mission: Conde would have you believe Portfolio invented the genre of business mag with style. Vogue Business? Not quite. So was there a market here? Consider: Only 10% of the WSJ’s readers are women. That’s why Lipman’s hiring made good sense: she launched the WSJ’s Weekend Journal. But the proof is in the pudding, and Lipman showed she didn’t get it, in just the same way Weekend Journal didn’t really change the pickup with women or younger readers until Murdoch. Even Tina Gaudoin hasn’t figured it out yet, and she knows style in her sleep.

6. Editorial: Long-form business journalism? Hello? See above. Despite 600 days of prep, Portfolio never had a well-thought through editorial positioning to differentiate in saturated markets. Yvette Kantrow writes in The Deal that Portfolio wanted to be the business magazine for people who don’t like business, but that doesn’t seem right to me: I think Lipman just had a shallow idea of business journalism that was distinguished solely by the idea that longer pieces could explain the complexities of business better than business magazines with known business writers. But it turns out that Lipman hired the same people, writing more or less the same kinds  of pieces with the same kinds of spin. Sure she won a few awards for this, but even a stopped clock is right twice a day. You could have put almost any competent business editor in Lipman’s job and won a few awards if that person had CN’s resources  (see number 4 above). I defy anyone to tell me what Portfolio stood for except a committment to spending money on long-form journalism.

7.    Credibility: From day 1, Lipman gave readers all the wrong signals. She put all her marbles on long form journalism when everyone was talking about digital journalism, then chose many of the same old prize-winners from Michael Lewis to Tom Wolfe. Her covers showed a complete lack of comprehension about her audience and the economy. Remember the golden skycrapers, the gears, the hairy apes, the spy—one cliché after another—followed by Dov Charney, Sarah Palin, and the fallen bull? What’s that you say?  She shouldn’t have been expected to cover the Zombieconomy when she was hired to celebrate it? Rubbish. She could have covered everything from recession economics and its style to derivative disasters  to Obama and his style—right from the start.  (That fallen bull was apparently stuck on the cover after Lipman feared she’d be seen as a Barry cheerleader, a copycat, or both.) She could have signalled outrage. Instead she signaled that she was personally offended by the fallout and incapable of explaining it. And flying to Davos first class didn’t help. (Gawker really excelled on its coverage of this point.)
8.    Digital strategy: Did I say strategy? (Disclosure: I interviewed with both the business and edit side before Portfolio was launched; it’s one of the few times I was happy not to get the job.) Yes, Ari Brandt and Chris Jones attracted talented bloggers—Jeff Bercovici and Felix Salmon were doing great work. But to what end? Despite a well-designed site, there was never any thought to how Portfolio would deal with its competitive set in the digital space, whether the competition was NYT DealBook, WSJ, TechCrunch, Seeking Alpha, Dealbreaker, Bloomberg, or even Slate’s The Big Money, which has no resources but is constantly working to distinguish its tone and positioning.

Portfolio had all the resources money could buy but no competitive strategy, no editorial strategy, no content strategy, no technology strategy. In any sector —fashion to rocknroll, tech to celebrity—there is a wealth of web-based data to be aggregated, scraped, curated, ranked, and regurgitated, but nowhere more so than in business media where data streams run the gamut from rich to richer. To have failed even to consider what that opportunity—the opportunity to deliver real reader value—means—and to have spent an estimated $100 million over two years on this ignominous failure—is just shameful.

Even as I write this, I’m reading media critics who are saying that Portfolio’s failure is merely an example of the failure of advertising or the failure to reinvent advertising. It’s the economy’s fault: “From an advertising standpoint, the goal was advertisers new to the company and new to the category,” David Carey told AdAge. “Strategically, check the boxes on all this stuff: a different voice, a different style, a different type of advertiser. All of that was on its way to being accomplished, and then of course, a significant hit to advertising from the recession.”

But none of that is true. Portfolio is simply the story of yet another media venture convinced that having a few digital trends and tactics—a blog here, a feed there, water as often as you can—is the same thing as having a real digital strategy. Well, here’s some news, friends: That’s merely another brand advertising outsert stuck on the web, and it doesn’t work. Even if you pour money into it.

Bye-bye Portfolio. You won’t be missed.

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Sy Fynstein? Wasn’t he a friend of I.B. Singer’s?

NBCU’s announcement that it is rebranding Sci Fi channel to SyFy: Imagine Greater provides an interesting strategythink. Stu Elliot, in yesterday’s NYTimes quotes Bonnie Hammer, the former Sci Fi prez, now prez of NBCU, and Dave Howe, the new prez, as saying that the reason for rebranding Sci Fi is that it’s a generic name that can’t be trademarked. But the real key to the decision is that Sci Fi has grown about as far as its programming (and current nom de plume) will go. Elliot says SNL Kagan estimated ad revenue for Sci Fi at $423.9 million last year, compared with $392.7 million in 2007 and $394.6 million in 2006, with 2009 flat at $408.3 million and predicted to rebound to $426.9 million in 2010. That’s just 7.4% CAGR in two years. Not great.

So what’s the solution to a 7% solution? Rebranding! SyFy must test well enough (so one hopes) that they think they’ll retain enough of the base and be able to grow in the Imagine Greater direction (let’s assume that’s some combo of suspense romance horror comedy that Stephenie Meyer is mining in her expanding vampire empire.) The strategy here would seem to be fire your worst customers (sci fi addicts driven by genre), and plug into the romance vampire fans and Harry Potter tweens. But as Scholastic found with Potter, this audience is impatient, disloyal, fickle. It’s not as if there’s a horror Gossip Girls episodic in the works that’s going to rock the neo-goth world. (I’d also be curious to see the research on how big neo-goth can grow, but that’s another story.)

So while the brand touchpoints might be out there, there’s real risk here in alienating the core by going too far to romeo vampire, while not getting enough fresh vampire blood to really imagine (and grow) to greater (>7%) future. Thus the chance of a Tropicana/New Coke debacle. It’s true, cable networks change names all the time: consider Speedvision’s transition to SpeedTV or TNN’s turn into SpikeTV or CourtTV’s mutuation into TruTV.

Even without a Tropicanadrama, I’m left wondering whether the payoff from a classic rebranding will be worth it. Here’s another idea: rebrand in the context of a shift that plays more to the shared community of interests between these genres. Current brand loyalists, most of whom are already heavy community activists (from Dungeons & Dragons to MMOs) will be happy, and emo neo-goth vampires will be happy too. (And think of all the Maybelline eyeliner sales!) The ROI that might be achieved by thoroughly revamping the terrible Sci Fi websites and turning them into, say, social community for genre lovers—cross genre from romance to goth to sci fi—might make a more compelling revenue opportunity. The impulse is much the same as Hammer and Howe’s, to broaden beyond sci-fi, but the focus would be on deepening these relationships to provide more value online—by mating and morphing the genres via community instead of brand advertising. After all, that’s how the romance/vampire thing got started in the first place.

It’s not that I wouldn’t also rename the network. I would: but I’d call my friend Sy and tell him lunch is off, that we’re spending more money on community than rebranding. My new name for Sci Fi channel would be Fick (short for fiction). And our tagline would be “Fick You,” to deliver more loyalists and prick up the ears of the new, oncoming core.

Now that’s imagining greater.