• New York Magazine, Tuesday, June 2, 2009 10 AM

Si Newhouse's Condé Nast empire is losing its glamorous sheen. In the last two years, Newhouse has had to close Jane, House & Garden, Men's Vogue, Golf for Women, Domino and Portfolio. The rumor mill wants to know which will be next? Wired? Architectural Digest?

The grim work has taken a toll. The man who loves magazines, one of the great media entrepreneurs of the past three decades, dies a bit with every closure. Colleagues say they've never seen him so depressed. He'll be 82 soon, and Portfolio may have been his last great fling.

Condé Nast, like all magazine companies, is struggling. The luxury market on which it depends is anemic, with no cure in sight. And the Internet, workaday and diffuse and all-too-democratic to an elitist like Newhouse, competes for the dollars that remain. Newhouse has long been a modernist, with forward-looking instincts, but suddenly he seems to have become a kind of magazine sentimentalist, in love with a world that exists in the past.

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