Plans for the move were first reported yesterday by the New York Observer.

The swap is really a testament to the power of Google (GOOG) and the long-tail theory: Even though Condé had been running Portfolio.com with a skeleton crew since the beginning of the year, the site was still generating four to five million page views a month, primarily because of search queries, says Condé Nast Group President David Carey. So that alone made Portfolio.com worth saving.

It will now serve as the central hub for ACBJ, a collection of 40 local business publications (including one I used to work for many moons ago). But it won’t just be an aggregator, insists ACBJ President Tim Bradbury. He intends to rebuild the site’s staff–he’s keeping two of the last Portfolio.com employees and intends to launch with a full-time editorial staff of five, plus freelancers–and pump out new content.

Bradbury says he’d “like to get the old band back together,” but I’m not sure exactly what that means. In the last few months of Portfolio.com’s life, the site was essentially a blogging platform for the excellent duo of Felix Salmon, who covered finance, and Jeff Bercovici, who covered media. But Salmon jumped ship for Reuters prior to the shutdown, so he’s presumably locked up. No word on Bercovici’s plans. But even if Bradbury can’t get those two back on board, I’m guessing there’s no shortage of applicants for full-time and contract slots.

Here’s the release:

New York, NY, May 20, 2009 – Portfolio.com will become part of the American City Business Journal’s bizjournals.com effective in July, it was announced today by Tim Bradbury, President, American City Business Journals, New Media, (ACBJ) and David Carey, Group President, Condé Nast. ACBJ and Condé Nast are units of Advance Publications.

Bizjournals.com will oversee both the editorial and business sides of the site. The Portfolio.com editorial team and sales staff will be based in New York. In addition to newly created content, the site will share content with other Condé Nast sites including Wired.com, GolfDigest.com, and WWD.com, as it did previously. The site will also be the home of the archives of all the popular content published by Portfolio’s print and digital properties over the last two years.

“We are excited about continuing Portfolio.com and including the site in the bizjournals network because we were impressed by Portfolio’s strong web presence, its clean and crisp design, and its voice in the business journalism marketplace,” Tim Bradbury, President, American City Business Journals, New Media said. “We believe our readers will benefit as the re-launched Portfolio.com will have a stronger focus on industry news and a greater mission to offer information relevant to today’s business professionals.”

On top of its existing strengths, Portfolio.com will be able to leverage the collaborative skills and insights of the more than 600 ACBJ business journalists around the country. The site now will have access to local market intelligence and work collaboratively with ACBJ newsrooms across the country, presenting the most important local insights through a national lens and making it unique among national business media.

“We knew that Portfolio.com was a highly valuable asset, with an established digital brand, strong direct navigation by users, and a solid long tail of traffic from content published over the past two years,” David Carey, Group President, Condé Nast said. “We saw ACBJ as a perfect match due to its great editorial resources in the business arena, and view this as a win for both Portfolio.com’s readers and the company.”

Condé Nast Portfolio magazine and its website Portfolio.com, launched in April 2007 and the magazine closed in April 2009. The site provided insight into the day’s top business stories, with analysis from bloggers and columnists. During those two years Portfolio.com grew to 2.8 million monthly uniques and won industry praise with awards such as the MIN:  Best of Web 2008, MIN: Hottest Launch of the Year 2007, WebAward: Outstanding Achievement in Website Development 2007, and Webby nominees in Best Business blog and Financial Services categories.

A decision could come by the end of June, the New York Observer reports, relaying information that executive editor Bill Keller passed on to his staff at a Wednesday meeting (no more tweeting!).

The short version: The Times is mulling two strategies. One would look a lot like the model used by the Financial Times whereby online readers get a certain amount of content for free but are required to pay up beyond that. The other would be akin to the one used by Web 1.0 pioneer Salon–a public radio/TV-style subscription/donation model that lets everyone read the site for free, but gives “members” access to extras.

The long version, from the Observer:

One includes a “meter system,” in which the reader can roam freely on the Web site until hitting a predetermined limit of word-count or pageviews, after which a meter will start running and the reader is charged for movement on the site thereafter. He warned staff at the meeting that this pay model would be “tricky.” If the word-count limit or page-view limit is set too low, it could chase readers off, compromising traffic and advertising revenue. He said the site presently makes “a lot, a lot of money” from digital advertising–though he wouldn’t specify how much–and that executives at the paper believe it is “substantially more” than The Wall Street Journal presently makes on a subscription-based pay model. On the other hand, he said, set these bars too high and there will be little improvement in revenue.

Mr. Keller described the second proposal as a “membership” system. In this model, readers pledge money to the site and are invited into a “New York Times community.” You write a check, you get a baseball cap or a T-shirt (if it’s like Channel Thirteen, a tote bag!), an invite to Times event, or perhaps, like The Economist, access to specialized content on the Web. He said he wouldn’t even be opposed to offering a donor access to a Page One editorial meeting as long as it doesn’t affect the paper competitively.

Recall that the Times was actually able to extract $10 million a year or so from its Times Select experiment in which it forced online readers to pay $50 a year to get access to opinion writers like Tom Friedman, Paul Krugman and Maureen Dowd.

This was back in 2007, when online know-it-alls (um, like me) jeered the paper for “cutting itself off from the conversation,” etc., and promised that if it only opened itself up to the Web, big ad dollars would come. And actually, the Times has done reasonably well selling display ads–the paper’s online managers say that its pricing for premium ad inventory has held up even during the crash, though classifieds/help-wanted ads have evaporated.

The problem is that the paper now needs much more than $10 million a year to counter its disintegrating print business. Hard to see either of the two strategies described above panning out, but well worth trying.

Time Inc. boss Ann Moore made her case for the survival of magazines, and in a broader sense, traditional media: If they don’t make it, who’s going to do the work to get hard-to-find information?

If she’d just waited a few weeks, she could have saved herself some trouble and simply handed everyone she met a copy of today’s New York Observer, which has a great story about the story behind the Alex Rodriguez/steroids story that her own Sports Illustrated broke on Saturday.

Per the Observer’s John Koblin, here’s some of what SI reporter Selena Roberts (pictured above) went through to get the story:

• Roberts started on the story at least four months ago, when she was assigned a general profile of the Yankees superstar.
• By January, Roberts and colleague David Epstein were confirming rumors that Rodriguez’s name had surfaced in a 2003 drug test. They eventually cobbled together four different sources to confirm their story.
• Last week, Roberts flew from New York to Miami to confront Rodriguez directly. After an encounter with a security guard and the Miami police, she drove by his house, then tracked him down at a local gym.
• After getting a “no comment” from the player, she conferred with her editors, and the SI team then spent another 48 hours dotting i’s and crossing t’s before publishing.

It’s a neat tale, and one the folks at Time Warner (TWX) should be proud of. And it’s a good counterpoint to pundits who assure us that one day soon in the brave new world, old media gatekeepers like SI will be replaced by the collective wisdom of the Web. Because the last time I checked, crowd-sourcing didn’t pay for months of reporting, flights to Miami, a team of lawyers, etc.

Could a dogged individual, working without a net, have gotten this story? Theoretically. And some bloggers working primarily with crowd-sourced tips have done some great work, too–see the great work that  Josh Marshall’s Talking Points Memo did on the Justice Department/Attorney General scandal last year. And, just to knock down that straw man–big media, armed with all sorts of resources, does get all sorts of stuff wrong, as the New York Times has admitted on a couple of occasions now.

But look at how much work Roberts and SI had to invest in tracking down what in the end isn’t a story that’s truly important, in a State-of-the-Union sense of the word. Now think about how much work it takes to suss out answers to much less sexy but more crucial questions, about, say, the way our government works.

I still don’t think that Moore’s argument–that these publications will survive because we need them to–will pan out. And I worry that only a small slice of us will get good info about important stuff. But when that day comes, I hope someone will have created a free Web archive of reporting like Roberts’s story, so that the rest of us can get a sense of what we’re missing.

The Time Warner (TWX) publishing unit let more than 30 people go from its Essence and Entertainment Weekly titles yesterday. The NY Observer and Gawker have details; the NY Post’s Keith Kelly reports that Matt Turck and Charles Kammerer, publishers of This Old House and Golf Magazine, respectively, are also out.

That brings the total body count (announced firings + requested resignations) to about 250, which means that CEO Ann Moore still has a long way to go before she gets to her rough target of 600 job cuts this year. Which means the next few weeks will continue to be unpleasant.

UPDATE: Add another 8-10 from In Style.

One thing Time Inc. staffers won’t be seeing during that time: More memos announcing details of the reorg. Executives at the company seem to have concluded that internal communications that have been showing up at this Web site and others haven’t helped employee morale. That seems sensible. But it also means that employees have even less information about their fate than before.

Meanwhile, I’m still collecting tips. As always, I keep all correspondence anonymous: peter@allthingsd.com.

Time Warner’s Time Inc. (TWX) won’t be the only magazine publisher making cuts this fall: Condé Nast is trimming its sails, too.

The New York Observer reports that every title at the privately held publisher is being required to cut five percent from both its editorial and business ledgers, a number that MediaMemo hasn’t been able to confirm.

But I can tell you that the staff at Portfolio, Condé’s business magazine launched with equal parts fanfare and controversy last year, has been summoned to an all-hands meetings that should be starting … now. I’ll pass along more details as I get them.

UPDATE: A partial list of departing Portfolio staffers.

Recall that just two days ago Condé Nast publisher David Carey was expressing (guarded) optimism about advertising budgets next year. I’m guessing that if he were less optimistic, the cuts would be even larger.

And what about CondéNet, the Condé division that handles Web properties for some, but not all, of the publisher’s magazines? No comment, but one might imagine Sarah Chubb’s unit will be cutting back, too.

UPDATE: Condé is firing most of the staff of Portfolio.com, shrinking it from two dozen down to “single digits.”

UPDATE: I’m told that Portfolio staff has just been told the magazine will now be published 10 times a year, down from 12, and will cut five percent from its edit budget. (A second source says that will amount to 18 to 20 staffers) The December and January issues will be combined, as will the June and July issues.

UPDATE: One officially announced cut: Men’s Vogue will be shrunk down to a twice-yearly schedule. The one-paragraph release:

Men’s Vogue will be absorbed into Vogue and published in the spring and fall, it was announced today by Charles H. Townsend, President and C.E.O of Condé Nast Publications. It will continue to be edited by Jay Fielden.”

Disclosure: I’ve done freelance work for Vanity Fair.

Here’s a nice summation of the state of newspapers today: A pep talk to a newspaper’s staff now consists of a pledge not to fire said staff.

That’s what New York Times (NYT) Executive Editor Bill Keller (pictured here) told his charges yesterday, and even then he couldn’t make the promise ironclad.

The New York Observer has the prepared text of remarks Keller delivered to the paper’s editorial workers yesterday.

There’s a lot of back-slapping for the NYT’s coverage of the financial meltdown and some other attaboys (as well as some references to competition from News Corp.’s Wall Street Journal (NWS). (News Corp., owner of Dow Jones and The Wall Street Journal, is also the owner this Web site.)

But here’s the part the staff is most interested in:

A deep, sustained recession will mean the search for savings and the quest for new revenues continues, that there will be no luxuries and little comfort. It will mean, as the company announced last week, that for management there will be some cuts in future pension benefits and retiree medical insurance. … The tough business climate has already meant the consolidation of sections to save printing costs. It will mean, I’m sure, that our hiring is even more selective than before. It will mean some new projects get delayed. It may mean we get more exotic and garish species of advertisements.

What it will NOT mean, I most fervently hope, is a surrender to the short-sighted, serial staff cuts that have hollowed out some of the nation’s great news organizations. There are no guarantees, especially since we have such limited visibility into the future. But as of now, even with the growing misery of the global economy, our aim is to move forward without another wave of newsroom buyouts or layoffs. If I learn that such a staff reduction is on the table, I will tell you, and I will tell you promptly.”

It’d be nice for the paper’s remaining workers if Keller could be firmer with a no-layoff pledge, but he’s not in a position to do that because the company’s revenue, profits and stock price are all in a multiyear slide.

Last week, on the same day the paper’s credit rating was cut to junk status, the company said it would consider cutting its dividend in order to conserve cash.