Hearst's long-awaited purchase of French media conglomerate Lagardere's international magazine business is finally official. The purchase price: $887 million. The upshot: Hearst may now be the most powerful decider of the future of the magazine industry.

In your magical Monday media column: David Carey welcomes himself to Hearst, the NewsBeast gets delayed, Pat Kiernan's website is in danger, David Carr has predictions, and newspaper companies are the stock market's biggest coin flip.

In your crowdsourced Monday media column: The Huffington Post covers the hell out of Arianna Huffington; Janice Min refuses to be spoon fed; and the New York Times lets NYU students loose on its blog.

In your melting Monday media column: perversity finds its way into the Grey Lady, fake NYT trend story may be fake, Katie Couric could return to CBS, and David Carey leaves Conde Nast.

• Portfolio isn't over and done with, after all: An affiliate of Condé Nast—based in Charlotte, weirdly—plans to revive the magazine's website. [NYO]
• Josh Marshall has accepted Maureen Dowd's apology for swiping some of his copy; and Dowd's new column today is Marshall-free, thankfully. [TPM, NYT]
• Upfronts 2009: What the CW and CBS have in store for the fall. [THR, THR]
• Is Jann Wenner looking to poach Condé Nast honcho David Carey? [NYM]
• Times executive editor Bill Keller says Google is the paper's "frenemy." [NYO]
• CNBC's Jeff Macke had a meltdown on the air yesterday. [Gawker]

Congratulations, Portfolio, on that lovely advertising spread for Apple's ultra-thin laptop on pages 2 and 3 of last month's issue. Whatever anybody's said about the magazine's editorial leadership, nobody doubts the Conde Nast title's appeal to advertisers. Ah, but then, again, there's that editorial leadership. Flick forward to Portfolio's feature on corporate polluters: Apple is among the magazine's 'Toxic Ten'. First of all, the magazine was ridiculously unthinking to include any computer company along with industrial giants such as Alcoa. More damning: Portfolio editor Joanne Lipman also forgot one of Conde Nast's golden rules: give an advertiser the opportunity to pull out of an issue containing a critical article. It's both polite, and politic. Apple is said by insiders to be furious, as is Portfolio's outgoing publisher, the normally unflappable David Carey, a rising star on Conde Nast's business side, and someone the embattled Lipman needs on her side. ENLARGE»

The former publisher of The New Yorker, Carey is now group president at Condé Nast, where he oversees Condé Nast Portfolio, Wired Media (which includes Wired magazine and Wired.com) and the Golf Digest Publication Group. He reports to Condé CEO Chuck Townsend, and is presumed to be in line to take over when Townsend retires in the next few years.

Let's be generous and accept Memo Pad's word that Portfolio is selling 15-18% of the copies it ships to newsstands. (We'd heard some issues had registered as low as 12%). That's still deeply embarrassing for Conde Nast, which has committed $100m to the new business title, the biggest magazine launch in years — and maybe one of the last before print enters its final decline. One Portfolio writer says of the magazine's numbers: "Well, that's not that much lower than Cargo." Yes, but Cargo's dead.

Drew Schutte, the longtime publisher of Conde Nast's Wired, will now run the sales side of The New Yorker and its website. David Carey, publisher of Portfolio, is adding Wired to his responsibilities. [BusinessWeek]

The bespectacled magazine publisher, who ran the New Yorker's marketing and ad sales before being roped in to help Joanne Lipman launch Portfolio, has done better than merely surviving the new year's massacre at Conde Nast. He's now the leading candidate to replace Chuck Townsend as chief executive of the elite magazine group. Nobody wins corporate infighting without making critics but, if Carey has them, we can't find them. "Everyone wishes there was some dirt on David Carey, but there ain't," says one Conde exec. The Portfolio publisher doesn't even get the blame for the business magazine's troubled launch.

Today endlessly irksome media columnist Jon Friedman writes: "It's still hard to believe that a monthly, which has published a total of two issues, can seem so important. Yet Portfolio has taken on the aura of a big-budget Hollywood production, where pandemonium appears to be everywhere. Unfortunately, the magazine raises comparisons with "Heaven's Gate" and "Gigli." ("Do you even remember the latter's plot line?" Friedman asks. Sadly, some people do.) Friedman trots out Portfolio's publisher David Carey and Conde publicist Perri Dorset to dismiss the hubbub and claim that everyone's just talking about their stories. And, for real? It's "hard to believe" that this magazine—for which Conde Nast crowed about spending $100 million and poached nearly every business journalist with a pulse and maybe one standout clip—"can seem so important"?

As you might have heard, Conde Nast's Portfolio launches today. The most important business magazine of its generation, Portfolio starts life with 185 ad pages in a 332-page issue. Cond chair Si Newhouse says the book was "inspired by a positive response to business articles in Vanity Fair and The New Yorker, although he could not recall precisely which ones." (We have the same problem!) Conde 's willing to dump around $125 million into making the mag a success, but some see the publication as a shot across Time Inc.'s bow. In any event, it's the little things that make the difference. Like the pillows in the "idea lab."