“We were always looking in, you know, watching this party happen,” he told The Observer. “Really attractive people would go in and drunk people would stumble out, and we’d just be watching it,” he said, turning around and plopping down onto a plush, tan chair in front of his desk. He was dressed in crisp jeans and a white-and-blue-striped button-down shirt.

“It’s nice to finally be at the party,” he said.

Mr. Peres was referring to the party known as, well, the Internet, to which Condé Nast has arrived not-so-fashionably late.

Last week, Details launched its own Web site, finally breaking off from its former online home at men.style.com, which the men’s monthly shared with brother publication GQ. The change had been planned since July, when Condé Nast Digital president Sarah Chubb announced that the men.style.com “destination site” would change into GQ.com. The company hopes that two separate Web sites might entice more high-end advertisers that are familiar with the print titles.

Men.style.com had been overseen by Condé Nast Digital, and magazine editors and writers were given strict publishing schedules for the site’s content. Staffers were only allowed to send new magazine content twice a month and were restricted to a certain number of photo slide shows, quizzes and additional features. There were no daily blogs, sparse commenting features and mostly faulty search functions. Worse, article URLs had mucky Web addresses, with a men.style.com slapped on them, which confused readers and bruised writers’ egos.

“It was a nice little science project we rigged up,” said Michael Hainey, GQ’s deputy editor, referring to his magazine’s former online home. He was in a conference room with GQ’s in-house multimedia editor, Andy Comer, and assistant Web editor, Andrew Richdale, who together run the just-launched GQ Web site. Mr. Hainey, in a camel-colored corduroy jacket and tailored jeans, offered a tour of GQ.com on a giant screen, pointing out two new blogs, online forums, how-to videos, podcasts and GQ’s City Guide feature with a grease pencil. He describes the new site to GQ staffers in a language they understand. “I call it a Mini Cooper: it’s nimble, it’s fast, it looks great,” he told The Observer.

“This is where a man begins—he searches for his life here,” he said.

But touting a Web site where writers can blog (wow!) and readers can comment back (gee whiz!) seems a little silly in 2009. Sure, both sites are gorgeous, with simple design and lots of potential, but the joke among Details staffers is that, even now that they finally have a functioning Web site, “it’s very 1999.” Mr. Hainey, for his part, figured GQ was slightly more advanced. “We’re very 2002 right now,” he told The Observer. 

Well here’s something a little more exciting: Last week, GQ also announced that the magazine will have a new iPhone app, available for $2.99 per issue, debuting with their crown jewel: the December “Men of the Year” edition. They expect it to be available in the iPhone app store the day the print publication hits newsstands, Nov. 18. (Though, with that price tag, why one wouldn’t just cough up two more dollars for the print edition and all its shiny photos is a bit of a mystery.)

Elsewhere at the Condé Nast Digital revolution: Wired is working with Adobe to get content on mobile screens besides the iPhone; The New Yorker is the most subscribed-to magazine on the Kindle; and Concierge.com (the online home of Traveler) just yesterday announced a new app that will allow users to turn vacation photographs into emailable postcards. Condé Nast Digital senior product manager Chris Gonzalez told The Observer that “tons of other apps” are in the works. “Every publication is asking, ‘When can you make one for my magazine?’” he said.

DESPITE THE SUCCESSES of sites like Wired.com and recipe resource Epicurious.com, Condé Nast has often been accused of forgoing quality Web sites to save glossy print titles. Fearing that the Internet would “cannibalize” print sales, Condé Nast built sites for most magazines that seemed more like teasers than destinations—they existed online simply so that readers might be enticed to click on the “subscribe” button to get the all the good print stuff. 

But in the post-McKinsey age, some Condé Nast executives are eager to mark the launches of Details.com and GQ.com as a glittering new beginning for the company, where attempting to make money off the Web will (finally) get its due focus in 2010.

Condé Nast Digital’s newly named publisher, Josh Stinchcomb, who was formerly in charge of ad sales as executive director of Condé Nast Digital Business Group, said more mobile apps, e-commerce and premium paid subscription models (like the one already adopted by Condé Nast Digital’s niche technology site Ars Technica) are on the way. He also said that along with a Golf Digest Web re-launch in January, two new Condé Nast sites will debut during the first half of the year. “There’s no reason for us to not experiment, and we’ll find the right approach,” he said.

Mr. Peres, for his part, is getting his Web legs by leaning on Paul Katz, Details.com’s new Web editor. “It’s actually really hard; I’m a magazine guy, we’re print people,” he admitted. “I have to learn a new language. I have to learn to say things in a smaller space, I have to say things on a daily basis, not a monthly basis. That’s why it’s good to bring on guys like Paul, who are Web-fluent. I’m more like a Web illegal.”

greagan@observer.com

As of Sept. 20—this morning, if you’re reading a brand-new copy of The Observer—The Times has instituted a sweeping but subtle redesign, to emphasize the difference between objective and subjective journalism. Straight news will remain, well, straight: laid out in justified columns, with even margins on the left and right. Stories that have been colored by analysis, commentary or authorial whimsy will all receive the layout previously reserved for columns: a straight left margin and a ragged right one.

“It sort of grew out the concern that we hear from some readers that feel that our coverage isn’t necessarily objective,” said Times design director Tom Bodkin. “Our sense is that they may get confused as to what stories are meant to have an individual voice, and which ones are straight news stories.”

Earlier this year, executive editor Bill Keller asked Mr. Bodkin to convene a committee to study the treatment of news and opinion articles in the newspaper. After a half-dozen meetings, the committee came up with a report establishing new guidelines. The group—incorporating staffers from an assortment of desks and sections—concluded that The Times’ existing approach was a muddle: “We have too many labels …. We do not have clear definitions for all of our labeled forms …. We are inconsistent in our use of language …. We are inconsistent in our presentation … ,” the report said.

The reformers called for The Times to throw away an assortment of tags and rubrics, some of them so undefined that the paper itself seemed to forget whether or not to use them. Gone are “Letter From,” “Washington Talk,” “Fine Print,” “Sports Notebook” and “Appreciation,” among others.

Columnists’ and critics’ names, meanwhile, will be migrating into large cut-ins in the text of their stories.

The changes followed from the work of an earlier committee, led by then–standards editor Al Siegal, which was dedicated to shoring up the paper’s credibility.

“One of the recommendations of the [credibility] committee,” said Mr. Bodkin, “was making the distinction of what is a column and what is not a column.”

To judge by the sample layouts in the report, nearly everything is a column nowadays. The ragged-right treatment is extended to music, theater and other reviews, lest readers mistake A.O. Scott for a news reporter. The samples also show the ragged margin taking over “Reporter’s Notebook,” “Journal” and “Memo” pieces in the front section, where smooth margins previously prevailed.

The change will extend even to stories that run on the front page. Formerly, everything on the front was laid out with even margins, including columns—which then switched to ragged right after the jump.

“If we put a column on the front page,” said Mr. Bodkin, “we want it to stand out as something different from the rest of the pieces on the page.”

So: News has even edges; opinion has an uneven edge. Except, that is, on the opinion pages. There, the columns will be justified like news, as always.

Before the Times reader can be confused by that, though, the reader will have to spot the typographic treatments.

Mr. Bodkin said the change may not be that visible. “I think a lot of design is to address subconscious issues,” he said. “Even though people might not notice, they might recognize it subconsciously.

Condé Web Launches Line Up Behind Cookie

On Sept. 19, Condé Nast consumer-parenting magazine Cookie rolled out its new Web site.

Where the old site featured a drab gray background and lots of empty space, the new homepage is splashed with muticolored text and photos. Inside are two new blogs: Daysitter, a roundup of news about children, and Baby’s First Blog: Dispatches from an Outspoken 3-Year-Old.

The site is unmistakably Cookie, in voice and ethos. “She speaks, I type,” writes the anonymous mother-interlocutor of Sophie, the toddler-blogger. Sophie’s daddy, mommy adds, is a “6’1” litigator.” (But what’s the price tag on him?)

“There is a depth of content,” said Peter Feld, Cookie’s Web editor. “There is a philosophy of constant freshness on the site.”

Mr. Feld joined Cookie in May 2006, part of this year’s wave of Web-editor hires for Condé Nast titles. The company was bent on decentralizing Web publishing, shifting the focus from themed portal sites—mostly pushing subscriptions—to individual online versions of each magazine.

So over the summer, at 4 Times Square, Mr. Feld and the Cookie editorial staff pored through back issues to determine what content might work online and concocted Web classifications and headings.

But the work of building the site happened at 1166 Sixth Avenue, at the offices of CondéNet, the company’s online arm. And when it came time to go live, it was CondéNet, not Mr. Feld, pushing the button.

Freshness is fine, but Condé Nast is built on central planning. Despite the talk of autonomy, the company’s Web reform has been less a matter of letting a hundred flowers bloom than of punching out new sites one after another, on a factory line.

“It’s interesting watching this company transform itself,” said a Condé Nast staffer. “But it’s not moving at warp speed.”

Before Cookie, it was Men’s Vogue coming off the reassembly line, with Web-only features including an audio interview with novelist James Ellroy and a slideshow from the orgy-themed “Trailer for a Remake of Gore Vidal’s ‘Caligula’” by artist Francesco Vezzoli. There is a Men’s Vogue blog in the works, according to a Condé Nast source.

Three weeks before that, it was Glamour, which added an interactive feature in which readers give blogger Alyssa Shelasky’s love life the Subservient Chicken treatment. (“51% of you said to ditch this guy over email, so I did,” Ms. Shelasky writes.)

Still awaiting their turn are titles including Vanity Fair, which is due to relaunch next month, Lucky, Teen Vogue and The New Yorker.

Along with CondéNet, some of the redesigns are passing through the hands of Avenue A/Razorfish, the tech-boom-survivor purveyor of Web sites to the likes of Kraft, the U.S. Navy and Verizon. Razorfish had a hand in the Cookie and Men’s Vogue redesigns, and is working on CondéNet’s planned destination site for teenage girls, which is scheduled to launch before year’s end.

“Google has thousands of developers,” said Sarah Chubb, CondéNet’s president. “While we are not Google, we are playing in a space that is very aggressive, and things have to change fast. We had so many projects to get done, and a compressed amount of time to do them in.”

“The schedule has been a gradual rollout,’ said Ms. Chubb. As far as the sequence of titles goes, she said, some “had timing pegs that made sense.”

“It really varies,” Ms. Chubb said, “and it’s nothing all that revolutionary.”

Men’s Vogue got its August relaunch, Ms. Chubb said, in anticipation of the magazine’s switch to a regular, bimonthly schedule. The November/December issue, the first on the new plan, is due to close this week.

Once a site has been relaunched, the Web editors continue to work through CondéNet to publish content. Three-year-old Sophie and the rest of the bloggers can be updated directly, but the rest of the material goes through the central office on Sixth Avenue.

“All of the editorial content that is chosen for the Web sites is chosen by the editorial departments of the magazines,” said Ms. Chubb.

Hiring Web editors, Ms. Chubb said, “had more to do with things evolving than with the relaunches.” The important thing, she said, was for each title to have a Web-savvy staffer in-house.

“It’s hard to be thinking about [the print edition] all day long, and then say, ‘What am I going to do with the Web?’” Ms. Chubb said. “It made sense to bring in someone that was living and breathing the medium—and the brand.”

Mr. Feld had worked with the print edition of Cookie on the marketing side, during the magazine’s dead-tree launch. He said that though the site is up, Cookie online still has more developmental milestones to reach.

“We’ll have more bells and whistles,” he said. “There isn’t Flash on our site, yet. There isn’t podcasting, yet. There isn’t video, yet. It’s still a work in progress.”

—M.C.