Portfolio.com relaunches

Condé Nast's Portfolio.com will have a new place to call home this July when it moves to American City Business Journals Inc.'s Bizjournals.com.
Bizjournals will oversee the editorial and business sides of the site from New York, Condé Nast and American City Business Journals announced Wednesday.
From the story:

"In addition to newly created content, Portfolio.com will share content with other Condé Nast sites such as Wired.com, GolfDigest.com, and WWD.com, as it did before. It also will be the home of the archives of content published by Portfolio’s print and digital properties over the past 24 months."

See the full story here.

Nieman Foundation selects biz journalists

Business journalists are among the 24 journalists selected for the Nieman Foundation for Journalism's 72nd class of fellows.
Announced Tuesday, the class of 2010 includes Wired magazine contributing editor, Jeff Howe who will examine crowdsourcing and its use in the development of sustainable journalism models.
Other fellows focusing on business issues will research topics like the economic impact of Latin American immigrants into the United States and the interconnection of the economy with life issues like foreign policy and health care.
See a full list of the 2009-2010 fellows here.

"Reuters Small Business" up and running

Reuters Small Business, a micro-site geared toward entrepreneurs, launched today.
Content now up on the site includes information for finding start-up funding in the bailout area and a multimedia feature on budding handbag maven Jane Saidenberg.
From the site:

We’ve got a dedicated editorial team looking at the stories that matter most to the small business sector, and content from partners like Entrepreneur, BNET, IDG, GreenBiz.com, and Wired. Editor Jon Cook will also be reporting live from the Small Business Week conference in Washington, DC.

Wired: editorial success and ad failure

An article in today's The New York Times details the challenges faced by Chris Anderson, the editor in chief of Wired magazine.
On one hand, the magazine has been a success editorially under Anderson's leadership. Wired won three National Magazine Awards last month.
But the story details how the magazine has lost 50 percent of its ad pages this year, a number that ranks it "among the worst off of the more than 150 monthly magazines measured by Media Industry Newsletter. Only Portfolio, which Condé Nast shut down last month, and Power and Motoryacht fared worse."
To read the full story click here.

Wired editor on free media

Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of Wired, talks about his new book and his notion that media companies can succeed in today's marketplace by charging consumers little or nothing, in the December issue of Media magazine.

He compares online tools and software to the media market and says music and video games will become free. He states that nobody wants to read an entire book online...we have to agree with that.
Anderson also comments on the newspaper and magazine model, saying "Most media has always been free to air. They say that if you understand why they sell newspapers in boxes that don't limit the number of copies you can take, you understand the newspaper business. They aren't selling newspapers. They're selling audiences to advertisers. [Magazines] charge a nominal price that is as close to zero as possible to incentivize the largest number of people to subscribe, but not so close to zero that it makes the product look de-valued. But it has no relation to the underlying costs."
Read the entire article here.