21 Most Intriguing: Joanne Lipman and David Carey

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21 Most Intriguing: Joanne Lipman and David Carey
Jeremy Greenfield & Courtney Barnes

Lipman: Editor of Condé Nast Portfolio & Carey: Publisher of Condé Nast Portfolio

These two intriguing people need no introduction. We'll give you one anyway. In September 2005, Joanne Lipman and David Carey teamed up for what will probably go down as the print magazine launch of the decade. Much had been announced about the book well before its first issue even hit newsstands in April 2007 (the naming, the frequency, the ambitions), the most talked-about being the hiring of Lipman and Carey. Condé Nast is reportedly spending $100 million dollars to give Condé Nast Portfolio a proper sendoff. We don't know how much of that is going to this duo, but we think it's money well-spent.

Joanne Lipman: I remember when I saw you [Cohn] at the AMC in Puerto Rico. When I saw you there, there was nothing to talk about. I had been at Portfolio for one day.

Jeremy Greenfield, editor of min mag: And they sent you to Puerto Rico?

JL: I went for the AMC with David and the Condé Nast people. It was a good place to go to meet them. I hadn’t even started working at that point. Actually, I was forewarned before I came here, that you go to Condé Nast— people here have told me and it is absolutely true—and you get a lot of attention from the press. Everybody was straight about it: ‘This is Condé Nast and people will pay attention.’ If Condé Nast gets an unusual amount of attention, well, that is what you signed up for.

David Carey: Even before we started our development cycle, the speculation started. It is true that our development cycle, which was a little bit shy of 18 months, is extraordinarily normal. Every start-up project that I have been on has a [development] of 18 months. And as you pointed out on the train today, Steve, the difference is that here, before the 18 months began, the speculation started. The sales team was prepared from very early on. We are coming in with ambitious long-term plans to build a successful business. So we know and we knew a year ago that the first thing to bring to mind is not to be a charity. In this world today where the bloggers have to out shout each other to get picked up elsewhere, which is their currency, all this [speculation] is totally expected. We actually have trained a team to deal with all the press that is coming out. And, anyway, advertisers live in a different world than the 1,600 little Web sites that talk about us.

JG: We heard a story at min about how you [David] were trying to sell Courtney Monroe at HBO on buying space in The New Yorker for Rome, and that you showed up in her office in a toga. Have you had to do anything similar for Portfolio?

DC: Not yet, but I am always looking for the opportunity. HBO is a very creative environment. The best sale of our life was when the Sopranos was early into its life, and to pitch an idea, we hired two actors that were thugs that looked the part and they stood behind her [Monroe] in the presentation and stared her down without ever breaking a smile. It was perfect. And I look for those opportunities. Although HBO is in the magazine, I didn’t have to wear a toga.

JL: I think he has great creativity. Before I joined, I was very happy in my past life at The Wall Street Journal and was not considering leaving until I was approached by Si Newhouse to reinvent from scratch a magazine of my dreams, a magazine that I wanted to read. And when I was making that decision, I had a conversation with my husband where I told him about the project. And I had hoped that they would make David Carey the publisher of the magazine. That would make it the ideal situation. And at that time, I did not know David; I had only followed his career from afar. I had been watching when he launched Smart Money Magazine.

DC: And ours won’t be the last significant launch in the near future. To all of the discussion that print’s days are endangered: There is clearly room for a successful format for print in the increasingly digital age. What we are doing with our content plays 100% to what successful print titles like The New Yorker are doing: content that you want to read at the end of the day—at the beach, at the pool—for people who want a more emergent type of experience. For those who think that everything should be shorter and simpler, there is a very large market. So much of business media in terms of magazines are designed to be read quickly and tossed. We felt a product that should be read over a longer period of time, read multiple times.

JL: I love creating new products. I love the creative part of journalism—the kind of stories I would like to read that I am not getting to read now. We saw how business is expanding into every corner of our lives and our readers’ lives. At the same time, the business journals were becoming narrower and narrower, largely because of the Internet and financial pressures. At the time I started as a reporter, you could spend two months or more on the ultimate story that would appear on the front page; because of the Internet, the news cycle sped up. The journalism suffered because you weren’t able to put in the kind of time and resources. There are some wonderful writers out there, and there used to be a place for them in the mainstream press. And there isn’t such a place for those people any longer and I missed that, and I am not talking as a journalist, but as someone who is extraordinarily interested in business.

DC: Something else that is very important to the success of Condé Nast today is that we do not negotiate our ad rates in our company. In some other client interactions, the sales people are empowered to take up to 30% off. For clients who say, “You are the business director, you can cut me a deal.” I tell them, “I can’t. It would be my last day of work.” We price our products intelligently. And we have to say it is worth it, and what others do is spend all the time on price and very little discussion on product. Here, the discussion is all about product. Si stood tall when people threw rate cards out the window. We thank our lucky stars a half generation later that that was exactly what happened, because it allows us to make investments in content and creating premium brands.

JL: I don’t want to talk about the competition, but I will tell you that the reason I came here and the reason we created Portfolio was that we saw opportunity to create something new. We are not reactive; we are proactive. And a lot of the chatter about what we’re doing here cancels itself out anyway. What I look at is reader response. We are a national magazine, and most of our readers are not inside the media world bubble. The letters we get from people, from CEOs, from top executives from around the country, have been phenomenal. It rivals anything I have ever done, even The Weekend Journal, which was in instant hit.

DC: We have our own internal conference office on things. Condé Nast is a private company, insulated from the short term focus of the rest of the industry. We invest deeply in a host of products. The mark of all successful companies is that you invest a lot of time and money developing products. We look at case studies going back to the beginning of time. Everyone else is not investing in the future in the same way. And so the idea of a kind of blog chatter affecting internal sentiment toward the product is a foreign concept. We have our own internal metrics we are looking for in terms of how products grow and evolve and so on, and they are not driven by
critical discussion left, right and
center.

JL: It’s really important in these jobs to just keep perspective, and what we’re here for is to do great journalism. We’re not reacting to competitors; we’re not reacting to the blogosphere.

DC: I think we are all excited about it—the gap between the first and second issue was an important period of time that allowed us to take a full measure of everything. But the monthly frequency takes the metabolism up to a new level, so I think that this next phase is terrific in every way because the business really starts now.

JL: Now we’re rolling. Its great to have the regular frequency. We’ve got a lot of talent in the room, and people really want to get moving. It will take several cycles to get there, which is true of any startup publication.[The criticism] just kind of makes me laugh, actually. I don’t pay too much attention, you know? I go home at night and I watch movies with my kids. I go home, and I watch "High School Musical" with my daughter.

JG: I don’t get this movie; it’s a big phenomenon, right?

JL: "High School Musical?" It’s the cutest thing you’ve ever seen.

DC: I saw the sing-along version Sunday night. They have so many editions. They are so smart. They have the normal one and then they have the sing-along that has the words at the bottom of the screen.

JG: Do you know the words yet Joanne, and can you sing? I mean, not right now, just in general.

JL: [Laughs] But no, I mean, you know, it’s, um, what we do here is really important. I’ll do whatever it takes for the magazine, but, the fact is, when I go home I’m with my kids. I’m mom; that’s it.

mInsight

Portfolio is wowing observers with its impressive ad page performance in its inaugural year: over five issues, CNP has sold 643.6 ad pages, including 111.3 in December, a traditionally tough month for business magazines.

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