Anne Fulenwider with husband Bryan Blatstein, Conde Nast executives John Bellando and Jill Bright.

On Thursday night, the newest editor-in-chief in the Conde Nast pantheon, Brides editor, Anne Fulenwider posed for a photograph with her new bosses, executives John Bellando and Jill Bright, and her husband Bryan Blatstein. As they arranged themselves, a drink slipped out of hand, shattering upon impact and splashing the celebrants with champagne.

“Mazel Tov!” someone behind us said, while the foursome stood still, smiling stoically as a server swept the shards out of the frame.

That joke was the only sign of Ms. Fulenwider’s nuptial subject matter at the debut party, hosted by Conde Nast chief executive Chuck Townsend and president Robert Sauerberg, where a healthy mix of men and women ate sliders at John DeLucie’s Upper East Side gentleman’s club, Crown.

But the setting befit Ms. Fulenwider, an editor trained at highbrow general interest titles Paris Review and Vanity Fair and most recently Joanna Coles’s No. 2 at Marie Claire, among the more journalistically ambitious women’s magazines.

Off the Record explained as much to wedding cake master Ron Ben-Israel, beside us in a makeshift receiving line.

“And so pretty!” he replied.

Dressed in a black boat-neck dress, Ms. Fulenwider explained that she had jumped at the opportunity to speak to women—“Brides are women,” she noted—at a happy time in their lives, but also a moment when they really need guidance.

Since the business of getting hitched ballooned to an estimated $72 billion industry, advising brides has become a rich media market for Conde Nast and its competitors, everything from TLC’s runaway hit 'Say Yes to the Dress' to The Knot, the print and digital bridal media empire that started as an AOL web portal.

Ms. Fulenwider’s arrival at Brides marks a major overhaul of the service brand. She replaced longtime editor Millie Martini Bratten, and longtime publisher Carolyn Kremins was replaced by Lucky’s Michelle Myers. Conde Nast has folded the sixteen regional Brides Local magazines and made Ms. Fulenwider the first Brides editor in chief to oversee its digital and print operations, following the resignation of Julie Raimondi.

“Before a woman gets engaged it’s all about getting the man,” Ms. Fulenwider explained. “Once she’s engaged she has the time to relax and think about how she’s going to express herself through her wedding and the rest of her life.”

For her own wedding, Ms. Fulenwider expressed herself in a field in Martha’s Vineyard overlooking the ocean.

“It happened a long time ago, but I still pray for good weather on that day, as if it could change,” she said.

As for how she’ll express herself in Brides, look out for her redesign in May.

Mr. Dadich

Not long after Scott Dadich was appointed executive editor of digital magazine development for all of Condé Nast, “the tops of the mastheads,” as the senior editorial staffs are called, filed into the company’s fourth-floor lecture hall for a series of meetings. Condé’s new iPad king was holding court.

This wasn’t the first time the tastemakers of 4 Times Square had met Mr. Dadich. He’d been shopping “that Wired thing” around the company since it debuted in iTunes’ App Store in May 2010 to considerable fanfare and a flurry of downloads.

But this time, Mr. Dadich faced a few more sets of crossed arms.

Mr. Dadich’s coronation, in August 2010, had come with a big window office on the seventh floor and a mandate to lead the brands that Si Newhouse built into the brave new world of the tablet, a device so shiny and elegant it made Condé’s stable of glossies look dull by comparison. Not surprisingly, Mr. Dadich’s arrival also brought a share of resentment his way in no small part because, even in the pages of this paper, his ascent from Wired, where he had spun a lagging title into ASME gold as creative director, was presented in near-messianic terms.

In a profile of Mr. Dadich in The Observer last August, Evan Smith, his former boss at Texas Monthly, likened Mr. Dadich to a “combination of Jesus and Pelé” before deciding, a moment later, that a comparison to Miles Davis and Frank Lloyd Wright was more apt. Legendary Esquire art director George Lois was, if possible, even more effusive about Condé’s new It Boy, declaring, “With a talent like Scott, magazines will never die.”

Within 4 Times Square, such praise was met with a degree of skepticism, but the breathless optimism among the Condé kingmakers who backed Mr. Dadich was to be expected. It’s hard to find a print dinosaur that doesn’t drool a little, post-recession, over the possibility of wading into a teeming new revenue stream. But Condé Nast felt the pressure more acutely than most. Mr. Newhouse’s puritanical if lavish stewardship of his beloved titles had left the company playing a careful game of wait-and-see through roughly the first three-quarters of the Internet revolution.

Condé’s initial flirtations with the web had been coy and tentative. Rather than sully established titles like Gourmet and Vogue, the company launched new sites, including Epicurious.com and Style.com, as a way of protecting its spoiled progeny from the rough-and-tumble Internet.

While Condé Nast was far from the only media company to find its established business model upended by the web, it appeared to be more paralyzed than most by the shift, perhaps because, in some ways, the rules of online media ran counter to the entire culture of the company. Where Condé Nast had been built on the notion of exclusivity—the idea that its gatekeepers held the keys to a sort of private club, doling out access to readers one glamorous photo spread or finely-turned phrase at a time—the Internet was messy, democratic and fundamentally untamable. Marquee titles like Vanity Fair, Vogue and the New Yorker seemed obsessed with hierarchies. The web obliterated them. Mr. Newhouse’s painstakingly constructed and assiduously policed royal court had come under threat—the villagers were massing at the gates!—and the ambivalence within the company was apparent: every attempt to welcome in the hoi polloi was met with an opposing impulse to head for higher ground on the castle wall.

Former web editors are still baffled by budgets that allowed for a suite to cover the Oscar party at Morton’s but can’t seem to assign to an extra desk for an online editor. Permission was required from the tech side before any print content was posted online. Nine months could crawl by before a request for an RSS feed or comment system on a site made its way through the system. Up until a few years ago, editorial staffers were shackled to a bloated corporate content management system that “forces web editors to spend enormous amounts of time wrangling the system instead of creating content,” according to one insider.

When individual titles began make their own forays into the web, they did so gingerly, slapping up what seemed to be placeholder sites geared mostly to picking up subscriptions. Meanwhile, rivals were popping up everywhere. “The biggest shame was that Vogue wasn’t Net-a-porter,” a former Condé Nast print editor told The Observer. “That was the missed opportunity of the century.”

The iPad, then, promised more than just a do-over. It was a chance for redemption. See what we did there? We’re not extinct! And for all his technical wizardry, Steve Jobs seemed a worthy partner, with his refined aesthetic and affinity for gated communities not unlike the neighborhood Condé Nast had occupied for years. The iPad seemed to promise that, both financially and culturally, the company could resort to its comfy old habits and maybe still survive.

Condé Nast’s digital efforts have been restructured so many times, it’s hard to keep the chronology straight. But call it CondéNet or Condé Nast Digital—as the digital arm has been named at various times—in some ways, it’s the same as it ever was.

IN THE FOURTH FLOOR conference room, Mr. Dadich preached his new gospel with the relentless enthusiasm of a mystical prophet. His crystal ball was showing nothing but iPad. Sales projections for Apple’s magic screenwere thrown around with exuberance. Here’s what we’re doing. Here’s our future.

All that sounded promising enough. But there was a catch: there would be no dedicated hires. Instead, existing art and production staffers from the print side would be responsible for making two iPad layouts (one in portrait and one in landscape, per Mr. Dadich’s vision) on Adobe’s platform. The idea was that since Condé Nast used Adobe’s InDesign and InCopy software to create its magazines, sticking with Adobe would make repurposing content easier. Based in Silicon Valley, Adobe had seen where the business was heading and was building software to get into the tablet game. In fact, the first Wired app was built with a lot of Adobe manpower and then rebuilt when Apple banned the Flash system Adobe had been using from the iPad.

Despite the setbacks Wired had encountered, Mr. Dadich made it all sound simple. “What we’re going to do is have workflow specialists come in, so it’ll be actually less work,” a source recalls him saying.

“I think that’s a terrible idea,” says Khoi Vinh, former NYTimes.com design director and author of the highly regarded design blog Subtraction. (A sign of Mr. Vinh’s influence: he boasts 210,267 Twitter followers to Mr. Dadich’s 3,155.) Mr. Vinh is highly critical of Condé’s print-centric, “magazine replica” approach to the tablet. “It’s like going to a Broadway stage crew, who are very talented at what they’re doing, and saying, ‘Can you help us create the next summer movie blockbuster?’” he told The Observer, adding, “I think it’s a fundamental misunderstanding of the way design works.”

Wall Street Journal director of design technology Erin Sparling felt the same way about retasking print folks to design for the iPads simply because they had used Adobe programs before. “That’s crazy,” Mr. Sparling told The Observer. “The assumption that it’s the same thing, just with a different output, is absolutely wrong. Just tacking it onto employees’ responsibilities seems like a recipe for making all of those employees very sad.”

It’s certainly been a culture shock. Some sources say art departments at titles like Vanity Fair, Glamour, GQ and Allure have had to give up their coveted down weeks between issues—time they once spent visiting museums and dreaming up gorgeous new layouts—in favor of working late on weeknights and weekends to produce pages in Adobe. They’re worried that burnout will turn to a morale problem, if not the makings of a full-scale mutiny.

Two talented digital designers, Chris Gonzalez, director of mobile product management at Condé Nast, and Vince Holleran, who helped create the New Yorker’s iPad app, both recently departed for Gilt Groupe. Anton Ioukhnovets, a former GQ art director, left the magazine last September after seven years for reasons unrelated to the iPad. Nonetheless, he said, “I saw it coming, and I was not interested. I didn’t want to do two jobs for the for the price of one.” He called the iPad “the bane” of his former colleagues’ existence.

In a statement emailed to The Observer, Condé president Bob Sauerberg, said, “From the start, we recognized both the opportunities and the inherent challenges of a new technology and medium. We have been aggressive in our digital development and we know the path to success can be bumpy. We believe in the talents and of our editorial teams to create their own apps—entrusting the design to those who have built our magazines. We are gratified with the way consumers are responding and we are extremely proud of what our teams have accomplished.”

While Condé swells with pride, there’s another aspect of its iPad initiative that baffles outsiders. Why lock in a partnership with Adobe while the market is still shaking out? “You don’t do a biz dev deal to get on the iPad! You just do an app,” said a source familiar with Condé’s digital operations.

“We, like our colleagues across the industry, are collectively inventing a new medium,” Wired’s editor-in-chief Chris Anderson said in another statement emailed to The Observer. “This is an exciting opportunity and our designers both want and deserve to be part of it. Designers come to Wired to innovate; this has the potential to be the most innovative thing we’ve done.”

That said, the transition might be a more natural one for Wired and its gadget-fiend readers. The latest unaudited numbers from the Audit Bureau of Circulation show Wired’s digital downloads capping at an average of 27,369 per month for the six months ending this past December. (For context, its first iPad App got more than 100,000 that month.) GQ’s app has less than half of that, with an average of 12,377 per month for those same six months, and Vanity Fair clocked in at just 9,438. Glamour’s iPad app, which was released in August, had a mere 2,471  monthly average for downloads. Condé seems buoyant about new circulation numbers coming out in August, pointing out that The New Yorker was the top grossing app in the App Store for most of the week after introducing a subscription offer.

Meanwhile, the numbers for the Nook, which requires little more effort than uploading PDFs of pages, are surging, and in some cases surpassing iPad sales.

In addition to dipping a toe into the Nook, Condé Nast is sniffing around Hewlett-Packard’s tablet. In April, AdAge reported that it hit the brakes on plans to deliver iPad editions across all its titles, saying they now need justification before launching an iPad edition. But the rhetoric of redemption remains. In a recent interview for Nieman Journalism Labs, Mr. Dadich was still backing the iTunes newsstand and the “dedicated container” for content that an app provides on an iPad, “where covers are the primary means of purchase and browsing.” To which one commenter replied, “All I see when reading this is an entire organization screaming, ‘WE WANT IT TO BE THE EIGHTIES GODDAMMIT.’”

AFTER THE RUDE AWAKENING of the recession, Condé Nast faced a turning point. It was clear the old model—concentrating on publishing elegant and high-end content and assuming that advertisers would line up for pages—was failing. Mr. Newhouse, who is in his 80s and has never been much for innovation, began increasingly to take a back seat, sources say, leaving a something of a power vacuum at the top of the company.

During the McKinsey era, when the white-shoe consultancy was paid seven figures to help turn things around, Condé Nast’s then-CEO and president, Chuck Townsend, was ready to ask for help. He created a ideas box—grandly named “The Power of Suggestion”—and invited any Condé employee with an idea to benefit the company to submit it. The best idea would be selected once each quarter, and the employee would be awarded a $10,000 bonus. But why, some wondered, would anyone with a truly disruptive idea give it away for $10,000 when they could walk to the Flatiron and get half a million in funding?

Later that year, Mr. Townsend handed over the president’s role to Bob Sauerberg, former group president of consumer marketing. That left Mr. Townsend (an operations-side suit), Mr. Sauerberg (a consumer marketing guy steeped in the world of blow cards and direct mail) and editorial director Tom Wallace (former editor-in-chief of Condé Nast Traveler), as the decision-makers charged with leading Condé to its digital destiny.

Though all had mastered various ins and outs of the print magazine business, at least as it was practiced in the last century, none were digital natives, and the mobile world was even more foreign. “These are not guys with iPhones in their pockets checking-in on Foursquare,” noted one insider.

It wasn’t a surprise, then, that the young Mr Dadich was viewed as something of a savior. “You know what it’s like,” a former employee told The Observer, regarding Mr. Dadich. “You sit in a room, and you don’t know much about a subject, but some person is able to discourse in it. All of a sudden someone says, ‘Wow this guy must be incredible!’ They’re anointed as the new king.”

And minting stars is what Condé Nast has always done best—from promising young designers selected as Anna Wintour’s favorites and aggressively promoted in the pages of Vogue, to internal staffers who find themselves propelled up the masthead. It’s the same model Condé used to promote James Truman, known as the “prince of Condé Nast,” to become the company’s second-ever editorial director.

“But,” the source was quick to point out, “just as in every royal family, the king has a certain time when he’s being fawned over, and then there will be a moment when someone chops off his head.”

It doesn’t appear likely that Mr. Dadich is on his way to the guillotine. But there are certainly those ready to plot a coup. Condé Nast employees described Mr. Dadich as “Tom’s boy,” and wonder if Mr. Wallace, the company’s editorial director, hasn’t developed something of a “mancrush” on his young protege. Many of the sources who spoke to The Observer wondered why, in a city suddenly teeming with venture capitalists, entrepreneurs and coders, a print guy like Mr. Dadich was picked to lead the way in the first place. One told The Observer that, last year, even Adobe requested a different point person better versed in interactive design. But that didn’t stop Condé from flying Mr. Dadich, who didn’t respond directly to an interview request, to Moscow a few months ago to deliver his spiel to the company’s Russian titles.

One source we spoke to said Mr. Sauerberg was busily trying to counter Mr. Wallace’s unwavering faith in Mr. Dadich, a relationship backed by Mr. Townsend. Then again, we heard some staffers blame Mr. Sauerberg for the seemingly short-sighted decision to partner with Adobe, while others pinned it on Mr. Townsend. Whichever view is closer to the truth may be less meaningful, in the long run, than the impression of a company on the edge of obsolescence increasingly falling victim to finger-pointing and internal power struggles.

It is, according to a Wired designer speaking from the magazine's headquarters out in San Francisco, a “snake pit.”

Still, there are signs that things may be changing. A few weeks into Mr. Sauerberg’s tenure, he tapped an unglamorous outsider, Joe Simon, an Indian expat from Viacom, to be the company’s first-ever CTO. It was a move toward what one source called “the way every other sane company in the world works.”

Mr. Simon’s biggest challenge might be finding a way to move beyond the Adobe partnership and a mind-set that looks at the iPad and sees a newsstand, but with virtual stacks of print.

“It’s obvious it wasn’t going to work,” said Mr. Vinh, the former NYTimes.com design director. “It’s only if you’re under the spell of this very traditional print-centric bias that you would ever think that this would work. I don’t know who the executive was that said this is the way we’re going to approach it, but this is not a decision that I would put on my résumé.”

ntiku@observer.com

Last year, after Conde Nast made the surprising decision of closing Gourmet and retaining Bon Ap, Ms. Fairchild was hailed as sort of a forgotten hero at Conde Nast. Apparently, her position as the only editor of a food magazine at Conde Nast will be short-lived.

The news about Ms. Fairchild's departure was lumped into a press release that announced that the magazine, like Architectural Digest, would relocate from the west coast to New York.

"The move of Bon Appétit's editorial headquarters to New York is part of the company's continuing efforts to strategically align our brands for future growth and to enhance efficiencies and coordination by consolidating our assets," said Mr. Townsend, in a typically cold Townsendian statement.

Ms. Fairchild had been editor for 10 years.

This has been a busy season for Conde Nast editorial director Tom Wallace. In the last six months, the company has named new editors at W, Lucky, Architectural Digest, and removed and replaced Patrick McCarthy with Peter Kaplan as the head of Fairchild.

In other words, Mr. Sauerberg has a very important job now for a company that is quickly trying to figure out how to handle a future that relies less and less on the printed product and printed advertisements. After key Conde Nast business executives departed this year — Tom Florio, Richard Beckman, and, most recently, David Carey — a little corporate reorganization is necessary (we wonder if Conde's friends at McKinsey had any role in advising this decision; sources have told us that consultants been back in the building in recent weeks). It also gives Mr. Sauerberg the role as a clear no. 2 to Mr. Townsend, the first time since Mr. Townsend was appointed CEO that there has been such corporate organization at Conde Nast. Meanwhile, Louis Cona has been promoted to Chief Marketing Officer, in another bump up the corporate ladder.

Interestingly, all of Conde's promotions came from within, and it also allows (speculation time!) for a clearer guess at who has the lead in becoming Mr. Townsend's successor when he finally does decide to step down as CEO.

Here is the full release:

CONDÉ NAST ANNOUNCES SENIOR LEADERSHIP CHANGES AND PLANS FOR GROWTH
ROBERT A. SAUERBERG NAMED PRESIDENT

New York, N.Y., July 23, 2010—Condé Nast is charting a new strategic course as a consumer-centric media and entertainment company in order to accelerate growth, it was announced today by Charles H. Townsend, Chief Executive Officer, of Condé Nast.  The company will be realigned to better embrace and harness developing technology; broaden consumer touch points; and create contemporary value propositions for advertisers.  To achieve these strategic priorities, several senior leadership changes were announced.
 
Mr. Townsend will remain C.E.O., with continued responsibility for the entire company, reporting to S.I. Newhouse, Jr., Chairman.  He has appointed Robert A. Sauerberg as President of Condé Nast.   Mr. Sauerberg, formerly Group President, Consumer Marketing, will work with Mr. Townsend in overseeing the company’s business activities, but his primary responsibility will be to move the company to a new business model focused around digital connectivity, technology development, and consumer insight. He will integrate corporate resources to support brand development initiatives and deliver maximum value to consumers, advertisers and employees. 
 
“The historical priorities that have served our company so well—great content, best-in-class magazines, key client relationships—remain the cornerstone of what we do, but we need to move beyond the magazine,” said Mr. Townsend.  “The set of strategic course changes being put in motion today will reorient our organization to thrive in this new world of opportunity, assuring the brightest future for Condé Nast.”
 
“Having worked closely with Chuck over the last two decades, I’m looking forward to implementing this growth agenda together,” said Mr. Sauerberg.  “These new strategies will enhance our innovation, extend the reach of our content and offerings, and improve our speed-to-market.”
 
With the increased financial management necessary for a growing breadth of products and services, John Bellando will assume the Chief Financial Officer title in addition to his current responsibilities as Chief Operating Officer.  Mr. Bellando will oversee the corporate fiduciary responsibilities for Condé Nast, Fairchild Fashion Group and Parade.

Louis Cona, currently Executive Vice President, Condé Nast Media Group (CNMG), will become Chief Marketing Officer.  He will engineer the evolution of CNMG into a seamless, multi-media, multi-platform sales and marketing services facility.  Mr. Cona will oversee the integration of the company’s print, digital, social, e-commerce, consumer insight and other assets to create comprehensive marketing solutions.
Thomas J. Wallace will continue to play the critical role of Editorial Director, working closely with the creative engine of the company—the editors of Condé Nast’s award-winning magazines—in developing creative brand strategies.

“We’re clear on the vision of where we need to be, and have the right executive team in place to get us there,” Mr. Townsend added.  “They are a tried and tested team with the experience, knowledge, and expertise to drive the change necessary to realize our goals.”

Condé Nast, a division of Advance Publications, operates in 25 countries. In the United States,
Condé Nast publishes 18 consumer magazines, two trade publications and 27 websites that
garner international acclaim and unparalleled consumer engagement.

First up, welcome special editions! On the heels of reviviving the Gourmet (for an iPad app), Conde Nast is continuing the branding and licensing of its titles by introducing special editions for the New Yorker, Vogue, Glamour, Bon Ap and GQ. The special editions will be sold in stores and on newsstands later this year, and will target popular features in the magazines. For example: "The special editions will build on the popularity of Condé Nast's award-winning magazines, but will focus on more narrow topics or features, such as Glamour "Dos & Don'ts," packaged in a creative and attractive way," said the press release. "Up to six Condé Nast special editions are planned for the second half of 2010 with the first expected in August."

They're expecting most of their revenue from the consumer, but they said they're hoping for some ad deals too.

Vanity Fair today also introduced an iPhone app on movie trivia, featuring "Little Graydon." This is one is free, and has an ad deal from Bing.

"Five minutes into the conversation today, he just got it," said Mr. Carey in a phone interview with The Observer. (We wonder what those first five minutes looked like!)

Mr. Carey is currently spending his last week at Condé Nast. The details are still being ironed out, but he said he will likely be starting at Hearst next Tuesday, July 6.

"This is the plummest of all assignements for me," he said. "Hearst operates entrepreneurially and when you see what they're doing in terms of innovating and taking risks—but they have scale and resources at the same time—that is a very exciting thought for me."

"It's just a fantastic opportunity," he continued. "It's tailor-made for me."

Conde Nast has gone through quite a leadership shake-up in recent months. Tom Florio announced he was leaving two weeks ago because he wanted to be a CEO of his own company and that wasn't going to happen at Condé Nast. Richard Beckman left because he could become a CEO somewhere else. After Mr. Carey lost Portfolio magazine last year, he has been in charge of magazines like Wired and Golf Digest, and cooking up branding schemes for Condé Nast. It seemed like he either needed something more to do at that company, or something more to do elsewhere. Now he has a chance to run a magazine empire.

"It doesn't say something about Condé Nast," said Mr. Carey, about the recent departures. "It says something about the individuals. These are executives who have been at the company for 15 to 25 years. You have a group of executives who are all around 50 and who have been well trained and are deeply entrenched in the industry and are ready to run their own shows."

Mr. Carey said an important reason of why he left—other than it being a big career step—was the "people piece." That is, he really likes the people over at Hearst already. He said that Hearst CEO Frank Bennack gave him his first gig as a publisher, and that both Hearst editorial director Ellen Levine and Hearst newspapers chief Steve Swartz are close friends.

"I know where I'm going, and it's very comfortable," he said.

Chuck Townsend, through a spokeswoman, said, "I have tremendous respect for David and we wish him well."

EARLIER: JOHN KOBLIN'S 2008 PROFILE OF DAVID CAREY

It's an experiment for Conde Nast: They'll take a magazine they folded (because they said it lost too much money) and replace the printed product and the employees they laid off there with a big internet community. And the Gourmet archives.

The "Gourmet Live" app won't launch until the fall, but you can take a look at a demo at live.gourmet.com.

The application will rely mostly on the archives of the Gourmet brand. In a demo shown to reporters this morning, we found the legendary "Consider the Lobster" story by David Foster Wallace, and a video of a recipe with John Doc Willoughby, the former executive editor. There's a decades-worth of content, but we wonder if it'll feel — pardon the expression — a little stale after a while.

Ruth Reichl, the editor of Gourmet from 1999 to 2009, was not at the press conference. At the briefing, her name wasn't uttered once. On her twitter this morning, Ms. Reichl wrote, "they're reviving the brand, not the magazine. Pity."

It's a logical experiment for Conde Nast. If they're going to to try to create a digital enterprise, why not make it (1) food-related, where, according to Conde Nast, 60 million uniques a month are trawling the web in search of food content and (2) use a brand name that's so iconic?

"Ca-ching! Thank you very much, if you will," said Conde Nast CEO Chuck Townsend, at one point in today's press conference describing the success of Wired's app for the iPad.

Mr. Townsend was sporting a blue blazer, a nice buttondown and a healthy tan (Bob Sauerberg, the Conde Nast group president who also spoke, wore a nearly identical outfit).

Mr. Townsend obviously hopes there will be a similar success with this app. He said this is a technology and revenue play for the company, and said specifically it's not a magazine or a digitized version of the magazine.

You'll be able to download the app for free, but then you'll be paying for things along the way (everyone was particularly excited about virtual currency). You can check out recipes, videos, stories and you'll also be able to take a look at a map and Gourmet reviews of a particular restaurant along the way.

But as Mr. Townsend emphasized — and which was reiterated by their partners at Activate, a technology consulting company — this is all about making a web business, even if it is creating a new one by using all the leftovers.

Ca-ching?

In the lobbies of 4 Times Square and Condé's buildings on Sixth Avenue and Third Avenue, you'll find a flyer with the words: The Power of Suggestion.

Mr. Newhouse and Mr. Townsend want to hear your ideas about making Condé Nast better than ever. (Read: Help!)

Is this a sign of the warm-and-cuddly Condé Nast, as we told you about last week? Or an indicator of just how truly desperate things are over there?

"It's all about inclusion!" offered one rather optimistic source.

For the rest of the year, once each quarter, the Condé Nast employee with the best idea about improving the company will receive-you ready?-a prize of $10,000.

Instead of dropping seven figures on McKinsey, perhaps Condé should have drafted its own employees for guidance.

jkoblin@observer.com

For years, the month of January has sent a cold winter chill down the spine of Condé Nast employees. It's the time of the Si Surprise! He returns to work from his December vacation spot in Vienna, takes a look at the numbers, waves his magic wand and sends some part of his company into hysteria. (Remember last January? He folded Domino.)

But this year?

It's a warm and cuddly Condé! CEO Chuck Townsend is taking time over the next few weeks to sit down with staffers at every magazine, hold their hands and tell them that everything is going to be just fine. 

"It's a rah-rah speech," said one attendee of his talk.

Basically, Mr. Townsend has been saying what you might expect-how last year was pretty terrible (hundreds laid off, six magazines folded) and that there's reason for hope now. Some magazines are already looking at a better first quarter! And there's a slide show!

"Lots of charts and graphs, you know," said another attendee. "Where's Condé against other companies? How much audience is up. Stuff on the GQ app."

It's Townsend with Personality. In the past, Condé Nast hasn't really been keen on internal communications. And who needed them? Every magazine ran fine on its own! But last year, in mid-July, when Mr. Townsend sent a note to staffers explaining that executives had to "rethink" the company, everyone was baffled why he chose that moment to become so chatty. For the most part, it freaked everyone out.

Now that the McKinsey-inspired cuts are done, there's a full-court press to get him out there, to make Mr. Townsend the warm and approachable face of the company instead of, say, the steely, cold figure that staffers interpreted him to be for years.

And, naturally, the effort is only sort of working. Mr. Townsend hasn't entirely gotten over the boilerplate, business jargon that he's so used to using. ("We created a more efficient cost structure, reconfigured our businesses, developed even more inventive, integrated marketing and sales programs, and refined our prowess in consumer marketing," read one, well, not-so-welcoming sentence in an email to the entire company sent out before the holidays.)

"It was really terse," said one reader of that email.

"I delete them," said one staffer when asked about Mr. Townsend's emails. "I don't even read them. It's empty words. It tells you nothing. It doesn't give you any insight into the strategic direction."

But in the coming days and weeks, everyone at Condé will be hearing his thoughts, filtered through that lockjaw-Maryland accent, up close and in person, even if what he's saying is high on optimism and low on specifics for the future.

Mr. Townsend has already gone down to Delaware to visit Condé back-offices. He'll soon fly out to the West Coast to visit the likes of Wired, and he'll be sitting down and meeting with New York magazines this week (The New Yorker's meeting was on Tuesday). (Back in December, he joined Richard Beckman at a town hall meeting for the Fairchild group at the Times Center-a rare public appearance that foretold his future efforts.)

As for the rank-and-file Condé Nasters: The bad news appears to be over, and everyone can rest easy that there won't be a sudden, shocking business decision handed down from top management in the coming weeks.

"I can't imagine any surprises at this point," said one insider. "All of 2009 was all one big surprise."

jkoblin@observer.com

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In the first week of October 2007, Mr. Newhouse signed a deal with the real estate developer Douglas Durst to build a new tower for his company over a platform on the West Side rail yards at the southeast corner of 33rd Street and 11th Avenue. The building would be 1.5 million square feet, more than double the 700,000 square feet occupied by the magazine conglomerate at 4 Times Square, a building it shares with the law firm Skadden. It would be a symbol of the company’s dominance in the publishing industry, set apart from midtown, looking down on the competition—big enough to accommodate growth, expansion and more magazines, too.

“We’ve run out of space, and this would be an enormous step forward,” said Mr. Newhouse, in a tired warble, appearing in a promotional video made by Douglas Durst’s team. “We hope to be part of the development of the Hudson Yards project with Durst for the next 100 years,” Mr. Newhouse continued.

But, only weeks after the agreement was signed, the Condé Nast engine buckled. House & Garden, the shelter magazine that Mr. Newhouse had brought back to life in 1996, was abruptly closed. Mere months later, his real estate deal was dead: Mr. Durst hadn’t bid high enough to build a project on the far West Side of Manhattan.

Just a year after he’d contemplated a move, Mr. Newhouse was confronting a dramatically different economic landscape than when he’d been talking to Mr. Durst. The Dow had plummeted. The banks had failed. And even Condé Nast was contracting. Cuts, modest at first, were made: 5 percent of all budgets in October 2008. A few months laster, in March 2009, another 10 percent cut was ordered. The significant closures of Portfolio and Domino followed.

>>READ THE BACK STORY ON THE END OF A CONDE NAST ERA

The prospect of the company growing enough to fill 1.5 million square feet of space, even years from now, seemed unfathomable.

And then finally, inevitably, there was the sudden announcement this summer that McKinsey was coming in to help CEO Chuck Townsend “rethink” the business that Si Newhouse had built for five decades. At the end of the firm’s tour of duty, four more magazines had been axed, including the elite, glossy ur–Condé Nast product Gourmet, and the seemingly promising start-up, Cookie. Over the past week, the “trickle” of layoffs that Mr. Townsend told us to anticipate two weeks ago have been made. By the end of next week, there will have been about 400 layoffs total in October.

One wonders whether the fabulous, powerhouse publisher that Si Newhouse envisioned inhabiting that massive tower on the West Side will remain fundamentally intact. Condé Nast executives say it will, but can it?

WHEN SI NEWHOUSE, who is now 81 years old, went to Condé Nast in the early 1960s, the company was just a small part of the Advance Publications business, which his father had built. The newspaper side of the company was thought to be the more desirable one (Newhouse pere installed his son Donald at the head of it). But Si persevered to build Condé Nast into the force that it became, and in the process changed the magazine world forever.

When the Newhouse’s bought it, the total circulation of Condé Nast magazines was 415,000 and the company was losing money. But, as these stories go, Mr. Newhouse made the most of his opportunity. Under the tutelage of one-time Vogue art director and eventual Condé Nast editorial director Alex Liberman, Si Newhouse learned what to love about magazines—what they looked like, how they felt, how they smelled. He was smitten. Over time, he made readers smitten, too. He also discovered how he could work in business. Instead of hitting cocktail and dinner parties, he poured over spreadsheets and market reports. When something wasn’t working, he called attention to it, and fixed it.

By the early 1970s, Mr. Newhouse became known as a ruthless leader. The moment that circulation and advertising numbers slumped at Vogue, Si Newhouse threw the legendary editor Diana Vreeland right out onto the street. He brought Grace Mirabella in to take it over, but again, by 1988, when numbers were sagging, he dumped her in favor of Anna Wintour. (The move was announced to the world by Liz Smith on Live at Five on Channel 4—Ms. Mirabella didn’t even know she’d been sacked.)

Mr. Newhouse was able to revive Vanity Fair in 1983 because the numbers made sense. He could experiment with editors until he stumbled upon Tina Brown, who changed it entirely.

The magazines looked prettier, glossier, and expenses were let loose, up and through the roof. This was Si Newhouse’s Condé Nast: big budgets, big splashy pictures, the best writers and editors with total creative control who became wealthy celebrities in their own rights. Money poured, and magazines got bigger and bigger and better. No other publisher could compete.

“Si is arguably the most knowledgeable guy in the history of American magazine publishing and global magazine publishing,” said Tom Wallace, Condé Nast’s editorial director. “He is irrefutably the most successful.”

IN THE PAST, when goings did get tough, Si Newhouse could rely on his family’s fortune to keep Condé Nast exactly as he wanted it to be: awash in talent, elite. In 1985, The Columbia Journalism Review described the Newhouse family’s Advance Publications newspaper holdings, which were and continue to be presided over by Si’s brother Donald, as “cash cows in a pasture.” In 1987, in a story about the Newhouses, Fortune said, “It is almost impossible to wreck big monopoly newspapers. About all they will let you do is get richer and richer.”

But one leg of that table has gotten wobbly. The Newark Star-Ledger, the crown jewel of the Newhouse empire, lost $40 million last year. That paper, along with the others, has become a burden rather than a savior.

So can the Condé Nast of the future continue to look like the Condé Nast of the past? The company would say yes, although the confidence in that belief seems better suited to boom times than bust. The printed word will endure. Advertising will return. Profits can be what they were a few years ago.

Perhaps, thanks to the company’s radical scaling back, some of those things will come true. But that doesn’t mean that Condé Nast will return to being the Si-inspired institution that has been so revered. Just look at the past three months: Chuck Townsend has been the star of Condé Nast, the Si whisperer. Having a money guy steal the spotlight is a major shift for a company that has in the past been embodied and defined by superstar creative types like Liberman and James Truman, who was the Condé Nast creative director for most of the ’90s. (Ron Galotti and Steve Florio certainly had their share of attention, but they never owned the spotlight quite the same way.) But these days, the man of the hour—the man closest to Si—is in the executive suite on the 11th floor at 4 Times Square.

“I think when you get hit by the typhoon that Condé Nast got hit by, the first thing you have to do is rely on someone like a Chuck to do what Chuck does,” said one former Condé Nast executive.

When Mr. Townsend hired McKinsey, he didn’t ask for a model on how to figure out the future. He asked how to make 2010 a better year. McKinsey delivered an analysis of the company’s spending, the ratio between edit and ad pages, how it all compares to the wider industry. 

“It was purely a financial decision,” said an insider, about McKinsey’s visit. “It was about efficiency, how your salespeople perform, how your editorial costs run in comparison to other averages. There was nothing strategic about it. It was an analysis of numbers, expenses and revenue—not even how to handle it. There were no specific recommendations.”

Indeed, executives unapologetically said that McKinsey’s analytics were in service of a short-term fix, not a reformed goal.

“The purpose of this is to shape the company to prosper in what we expect will be 2010 revenues,” said Tom Wallace, the editorial director at Condé Nast. “If 2010 repeats ’09, which is a bad year, we’re fine. Even if there’s a double dip. We’re prepared for it. If there’s any improvement at all, we’ll be in extremely good shape.”

But is that enough at this point? What about the grand launches that we’ve associated with Si Newhouse’s Condé Nast? And what about online efforts, which everyone seems to agree are integral to the future of media? (The company announced on Tuesday that GQ will be available for $2.99 on your iPhone starting next month. But even Mr. Wallace conceded to us that a smartphone “is not ideal” for magazine pieces. It’s a start, but nothing like a solution.) Doesn’t Mr. Newhouse need a new whisperer, à la Lieberman or Truman, to take his company into the post-McKinsey era?

“It’s not visionary stuff,” said the former Condé Nast executive of the current state of the company. “It’s about cutting and pulling back and restoring some of the fundamentals. That’s what every company has to do—otherwise they go out of business. One hopes that after that, a new vision can assert itself that is not just about how Chuck thinks. At some point, the company will need a new visionary.”

“THERE IS NO particular global view about what Condé Nast should be,’’ said Mr. Newhouse in an interview in 1989 with The New York Times Magazine. Instead, he said, “thinking pragmatically” is the key to his company. When it comes to starting, buying or revamping a magazine, Mr. Newhouse said then that he does it “if it seems like a good idea at the time.’’

Twenty years and one big giant media retrenchment later, there’s no evidence that Condé Nast has a new strategy. But it remains to be seen how, in this climate, Condé Nast can live at the same altitude it has inhabited for the past 50 years.

“How would you know what’s going to happen in the magazine business?” said Mr. Wallace. “You would look at its vital statistics. You would look at its sources of income from consumers, and from advertisers. And you would look at where you’re finding your circulation. We have no problem with circulation for print magazines.

“We have what we believe is a short-term problem with advertising revenue,” he continued. “That problem seems to be improving. How long will there be print magazines? I don’t know. But for as long as there will be, Condé Nast is well positioned.”

The core belief of Mr. Newhouse’s company—that advertising will return, that everything will be O.K.—is decidedly a risk. One has to wonder if Mr. Newhouse is simply comfortable to look into the next frontier, if this confidence in the old model is born as much from familiarity as from true belief.

“We’re so attached to a great publishing model that served us so well from World War II to September 15, 2008, but what if they don’t know that the model has died?” said Samir Husni, the director of the Magazine Innovation Center at the University of Mississippi. “How many electrical shocks can you send before they see it’s dead?”

But Mr. Wallace fundamentally disagrees.

“The advertising revenue until proven otherwise is cyclical,” said Mr. Wallace. “And if it is proven otherwise, we’ve already adjusted for it.”

The 16 million people—and if you add in The New Yorker, the 20 million people—who read Condé Nast magazines every month, will stay right there, he believes. Along with the advertisers.

“I was the editor of Condé Nast Traveler during the Persian Gulf War. If you may remember, that was the end of travel as we know it. It was shutdown worldwide. It was followed by avian flu, SARS, hurricanes and typhoons and God knows what. There were bankruptcies on a massive scale in the hotel business.

“Travel came back,” he continued. “And Traveler came back. And then we went to September 11, Persian Gulf II. Stuff happens. And every time that happens, there is someone who wants to say it’s the end of the world.”

Si Newhouse, despite everything, still isn’t one of them.

For the famous pragmatic thinker who built the Condé Nast empire, it’s his greatest risk yet.

jkoblin@observer.com

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