"I've been here a long time and I really love the place," Mr. Florio told The Journal. "So it's not like I'm unhappy. But if I don't do this now, then when?"

Mr. Florio is the younger brother of the late Steve Florio, a former CEO and president at the company. In his time at Condé he has worked on The New Yorker, Traveler, GQ, Bon Appetit and Vogue, among other titles.

Mr. Florio, who holds the title of senior vice president and publishing director, said he wanted to be a CEO.

The Observer caught up with Mr. Florio at a fashion show last fall. At the time R.J. Cutler's The September Issue, which shows Mr. Florio leading Vogue's busines side during a record September, was showing in theaters.

"The feedback that I have received is that brought back the creativity and hard work of what it means to be in the fashion business," Mr. Florio said about the film. "As opposed to those reality shows where these amateurs portray the business as very frivolous."

"Hi, Mr. Florio! Can we have a minute of your time for the Observer?" we asked.

He looked up nervously and said, "Oh, no. Are you going to ask me about McKinsey?"

"Um, no?"

"Okay, then."

Mr. Florio told us that his Fashion Week schedule is fairly relaxed and that so far he has been to Max Azria, Thakoon, and Tory Burch. "I try to do a mix of fashion leaders like Oscar as well as newer designers," he said.

If fashion editors attend shows to plan future spreads and retailers to place orders, the Transom wondered, why is someone like Mr. Florio there?

"I look for trends," he said. Like knee-high boots and sculpted shoulders?

He laughed. "No, I look for trends in the business," he said, "Like the whole idea of luxury at a better price point, which is something Tory Burch is doing. I try to get a sense of the sociological trends which our editors will adapt. It just ads a little context. You need to understand the business trends like global warming and fabrics getting lighter and more transitional pieces in fashion. If you can speak intelligently about these things when you sell ad pages, you can sort of take their [advertisers'] point of view."

Interesting! We then asked Mr. Florio what sorts of responses he's gotten to R.J. Cutler's The September Issue, in which he appears a warm and likeable fellow, gallantly defending Ms. Wintour's perceived remoteness.

"The feedback that I have received is that brought back the creativity and hard work of what it means to be in the fashion business," he said. He paused for a moment. "As opposed to those reality shows where these amateurs portray the business as very frivolous."

Did we mention that Elle's Anne Slowey, the star of CW's Stylista, was sitting right across the aisle?

But this year, with the industry falling to its knees, the awards were understated. There was cocktail attire in lieu of monkey suits and gowns last night. ("Thank you to the genius who got rid of the black tie requirement," said David Remnick when his magazine took home an award, a joke that bombed big time.) There were fewer attendees. The name tags for press reporters covering the event was discouragingly small. The open bar closed promptly at a few minutes before 7, meaning it was open barely an hour, disappointing pretty much the entire room. Time Inc. CEO Ann Moore was overheard marveling to a friend how the small the event was; Tom Florio, the Vogue publisher, said the same thing.

But first, the business end of the evening: It was a year with upsets insofar that any year can be defined by upsets. No single magazine stood out last night: Backpacker—Backpacker!—took home three awards, which is as many as Esquire, The New Yorker or Wired.

Field & Stream beat The New Yorker for General Excellence with circulation of 1 million to 2 million. Bicycling won for public interest ("Bicycling? Seriously?!" said Loren Mooney, the editor of Bicycling, when she got to the stage); Automobile beat out The Nation, The New Republic, The New Yorker and Sports Illustrated  for Comments and Commentary.

AARP beat Salon, National Geographic, Wired and Epicurious for Best Interactive Feature.

It was that kind of night. The New Yorker won for its photography, its fiction and for the essays of James Wood, but nothing else. New York magazine won for general excellence online, but otherwise, Adam Moss was unusually absent from the show—his magazine didn't win another Ellie.

In speeches last night there was, predictably, some faint desperation in the air. It's an annual event for Condé Nast editors to thank Si Newhouse, but it felt more significant.

Wired editor Chris Anderson, after winning for one of his three awards last night, came up and told a story. He said there was a monthly meeting at Condé Nast and he had to present the cover of Wired to Mr. Newhouse. Vogue and Vanity Fair, which presented at the same meeting, both had fantastic covers. Mr. Anderson wanted to put something called the Gaussian copula function on his cover, which is "the secret formula that destroyed Wall Street."

"I said, 'This is probably going to tank on the newsstand, but it's a really cool story," said Mr. Anderson. "And Si said, 'Oh, it doesn't matter.'"

The crowd laughed hard and long.

"But it gave me courage and gives me courage, so thank you, Si, for allowing us to be brave," said Mr. Anderson, whose magazine declined 57.2 percent in ad pages in the first quarter.

"Thank you to our publisher Lisa Hughes, and to Si Newhouse, who I like to think of as the Babe Ruth of magazine proprietors," said Mr. Remnick after Mr. Wood won for reviews and criticism. "Not every ball goes over all the wall, but history remembers the one who takes the big swings, the ones who takes chances."

Wait ... do we smell a trend? It isn't the first time we heard that last night!

"We swing for the bleachers every day at Condé Nast," said Vogue publisher Tom Florio in an interview at a cocktail reception before the awards began.  "And if you swing for the bleachers? Sometimes you strike out. Somebody yesterday at the meeting said, 'Babe Ruth led the league in strikeouts, and led the league in homers. If you don't have the balls to swing, you'll never hit."

It's an intriguing metaphor: For one, it offers Condé Nast employees the chance to compare Si to the Greatest That Ever Played. Sure. But you know ... well, Babe Ruth doesn't play anymore, and hasn't in about seven decades. It's interesting to hear Mr. Remnick discuss Mr. Newhouse and legacies and history. Is everyone writing the history now before it gets worse?

Also, sometimes thank-yous can only get you so far. Editors and executives always warn that Ellies never translate into ad/sales success. Last year Portfolio won for its "In Brief" section and Ms. Lipman praised and praised Mr. Newhouse.

In any event, the Condé Nast editors weren't the only ones who had to say thank you (in fact, Time Inc. editors never got a chance—they didn't win an Ellie). Other places need it, too.

"I'd like to thank my bosses Bill Keller and Arthur Sulzberger," said a particularly jittery Gerry Marzorati, the editor of The New York Times Magazine, which won the Reporting category for a story by Dexter Filkins. "This kind of reporting costs a lot of money. It's not a particularly good time at The New York Times to be asking people for a lot of money."

No, it is not, and he was particularly grateful for the investment. It was also the Times Magazine's first-ever Ellie. This was the magazine's second year of eligibility.

"I really believe that Dexter is the era's great war reporter, and this is all about him," he said.

According to Condé Nast sources, Mr. Florio was not at all pleased with the thought of Ms. Phillips raiding his staff as she figured out her plans with InStyle. Moreover: “He really cared for her and he was really bruised when she said she was leaving,” as one well-placed insider put it.

Mr. Florio had additional reason to be wounded. Before Ms. Phillips got her new gig, the executive director of beauty ads at Vogue, Toria Garrett, announced she was leaving for InStyle, to become the advertising director of beauty and lifestyle. She was a hot property at a time when beauty—which is to say, cosmetics—is particularly important to women’s magazines; fashion companies have balked at advertising in the face of their industry’s general contraction; but even during a depression—especially during a depression—women always need a little lipstick pick-me-up!

After Ms. Phillips’ letter of resignation landed on Mr. Florio’s desk, a decision was made to go back after Ms. Garrett, hard. This may be a moment when many staffers throughout Condé Nast are taking on two and three jobs, but Mr. Florio grew up in the company at a point when raiding rival staffs, whatever it took, was part of the game. Time to turn back the clock. 

On March 2, Ms. Garrett abruptly turned around, without putting in even one day at InStyle, and announced she was moving back to Vogue, with a shiny new title: advertising director, overseeing the magazine’s beauty and non-endemic business.

Score for Mr. Florio.

Both camps insist that there was no specific message sent by the rehire, and that there is no tension.

“Tom encouraged Connie Anne to interview for the position at InStyle,” said Elissa Lumley, spokeswoman for Vogue. “He called people in the organization to recommend her. When he heard that Connie Anne got the job, he was genuinely happy for her and hugged her.”

“Connie Anne and Tom remain good friends,” said an InStyle spokeswoman, “and she is focused on getting to know her new staff at InStyle.

Yet one could be forgiven for expecting Mr. Florio’s and Ms. Phillips’s newfound professional rivalry to be fraught. They’ve had a close working relationship for years. They were also friends—they’re neighbors in Sag Harbor, and Mr. Florio’s children affectionately called Ms. Phillips “Auntie Con-Con.”

Ms. Phillips was also one of the most powerful deputies at 4 Times Square. While Mr. Florio oversees the large Vogue empire, Ms. Phillips did a lot toward running the day-to-day operations at the classy monthly. Last year, her title was changed to managing director to reward her for increased influence at the magazine.

In recent months, however, Condé Nast has not been in a position to be particularly nurturing of proteges. When Si Newhouse and CEO Chuck Townsend were considering what to do with the now-defunct shelter title Domino a few months ago, they were openly shopping for a new publisher. Ms. Phillips, two sources said, wanted the job. She did not get it (of course, this might have been a blessing, since the decision was made to fold Domino on Jan. 28).  

Ms. Phillips started at InStyle on Feb. 23, one workday after she resigned from Vogue.

jkoblin@observer.com

According to sources familiar with the situation, when Condé Nast executives walked into a weekly meeting last Monday, October 27th at their headquarters at 4 Times Square, it was not clear whether chairman Si Newhouse and C.E.O. Chuck Townsend would decide to scale back several titles, or to fold them entirely.

Two magazines, Portfolio and Men’s Vogue, were specifically in trouble. Both magazines are newer titles for the company—18-months- and 3-years-old respectively—and have had difficulty drawing instant results, particularly in an ad climate that Condé Nast executive director Tom Wallace told the Portfolio staff later was the worst he had ever seen.

In its first full year, Portfolio has been struggling as a business. This year it is on track to lose roughly $20 million, according to two Condé Nast sources.

But in the marathon discussions, as everyone knows now, both magazines were saved, albeit in a reduced state. Condé Nast would all but end its support for portfolio.com by eliminating most of its employees, and the monthly magazine would run 10 times next year. Men’s Vogue would have to lay off the vast majority of its staff and would run only twice a year.

Men’s Vogue had the support of its publishing director, Tom Florio, and its editorial director, Anna Wintour, a person who has always had sway with Mr. Newhouse.

For Portfolio, its most vocal supporters included David Carey, a Condé Nast group president and formerly publisher of the magazine, along with Tom Wallace, who has been one of the few executives to publicly endorse the magazine this year, which he did in an interview with Women’s Wear Daily in April. At the meeting, both passionately lobbied Mr. Newhouse, and their efforts were ultimately rewarded.

There would, of course, be greater sacrifices for Portfolio.

The company has decided each magazine has eliminate 10 percent from the budgets of both its editorial and business staffs (5 percent for non-salaried commitments; 5 percent from its payroll). Many magazines have been saved from the burden of cutting staff, and instead are fulfilling the cut requirement by eliminating unfilled positions.

Portfolio, however, was told it had to cut 20 percent of its staff. The layoffs are nearly complete at the magazine, and they include decision to lay off three senior editors and all of its staff writers except for Jesse Eisinger who was offered a position as editor-at-large. (Some staff writers are being given the option of signing a contract). [Update, 4:24 p.m.: Not all staff writers were offered contracts.]

In another example of his support, Mr. Wallace made his first appearance at a staff meeting at the magazine on Thursday, October 30th where Joanne Lipman announced the layoffs. He said the magazine had the full backing of Si Newhouse.

And those two weren’t the only magazines whose survival was in doubt. One of the company’s bridal titles, Elegant Bride, was also said to be in trouble, according to a Condé Nast source.

Ad Age reported that two supplemental magazines, Fashion Rocks and Movies Rock, will not run next year.

Tom Florio, and his older brother, the late Conde Nast business honcho Steve Florio, have always had a thing for water and boats, but generally they're into the sort of stuff you can indulge in while in Sag Harbor. Gondola racing doesn't figure to be one of them. Mr. Florio doesn't have much of an explanation, either, saying, “I think I already went through my midlife crisis.”

Billing itself at “800 Pages” (though paginated to 802), the upcoming September Vogue falls shy of last year’s 832-page performance. The ritual “Biggest Issue Ever!” cover line is absent. Still, Mr. Florio had bigger things to count than pages.

“How do I feel about it?” Mr. Florio asked. “I feel good about it.” He eased forward in his leather armchair and picked it up, savoring the heft.

The 2005 September issue, Mr. Florio said, “has brought in more revenue for a monthly magazine than probably any magazine ever published in the world—since the cavemen.”

The cavemen, or other literal-minded folk, might be confused by the publisher’s definition of “magazine”: The $2 million revenue increase that Mr. Florio is reporting to the Publisher’s Information Bureau includes some money from Men’s Vogue, which will make its newsstand debut—still, officially, as a test product—in September, with its older sister as chaperone.

The bookkeeping fits with Mr. Florio’s concept of Vogue: a brand that can’t be contained by two covers, even when those covers are 1 1/8 inches apart. Hence the second publication on Mr. Florio’s coffee table: a Vogue marketing brochure, cut bigger than a tabloid newspaper, with a translucent bluish-white plastic cover.

The lush pages feature trippy, larger-than-Vogue versions of iconic Vogue photographs—including Annie Leibovitz’s December 2003 Wonderland shoot, with John Galliano as the mad Queen of Hearts to Natalia Vodianova’s flamingo-toting Alice. They also contain Mr. Florio’s blueprint for transforming Vogue from a women’s fashion title to “a world of experiences,” encompassing “dynamic multi-media platforms.”

The brochure touts, among other offerings, the Vogue documentary, Seamless, which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in April; plans for a theatrical release are ongoing. There’s also the Shopvogue.com Web site—roll over the ads and click to buy!—the syndicated television programming available in 78 million homes, the party planning group, the data-mining initiatives, and the in-house advertising studio for clients such as Bergdorf Goodman, Cartier and Cointreau (“campaigns … that pair unique ideas with the same incredible photographers and stylists who distinguish our editorial pages”).

And—oh, yeah—there are the magazines: Men’s Vogue, Teen Vogue and, if Mr. Florio has his way, Vogue Living sometime next year. And naturally, beyond and beneath it all, holding up the edifice: Anna Wintour’s Vogue, also known around headquarters as “Big Vogue.”

Even if it’s the teensiest bit not so big—or at least not so Biggest! From January through July, Vogue’s ad pages were down 2.5 percent compared to the same period last year, according to the Magazine Publishers of America.

As a stainless-steel coffee maker gurgled in the corner of his 12th-floor corner office, Mr. Florio made his case for alternative measures. “I have a file in my drawer, I could throw down every fashion magazine and show you what people are paying in their March issue,” he said. “And their discounts are between 68 and 80 percent to buy ads in these other magazines. What’s $150,000 in Vogue is literally $16,500 in another magazine …. I don’t look at their ads. They’re just giving away ads. The whole idea of tracking ads is absurd today because they don’t mean anything.”

Rival publishers disputed Mr. Florio’s claims of widespread cut-rate advertising. “We don’t discount,” said Stephanie George, president of In Style. “We work for a very big company called Time Inc., and they don’t need me to do that.”

Still, this year, Vogue raised its rate base—the circulation guaranteed to advertisers—to 1.2 million. “I get paid, and everyone who works for me gets paid, on revenue,” Mr. Florio said. “Not pages.”

For all his interest in the multimedia future, Mr. Florio is something of an atavistic figure: the last of a certain breed of Condé Nast publisher. Of the three “Italian Guys”—Mr. Florio, his brother Steven and “Mr. Big” Ron Galotti—who lunched annually at Da Silvano in Decembers throughout 90’s, Tom Florio is the only one still holding an active day-to-day position in the company.

His hot-blooded older brother stepped down as Condé Nast C.E.O. in January 2004; Mr. Galotti, the Vogue publisher from 1994 to 1998, retreated in March 2004 to a 100-acre farm in North Pomfret, Vt.

But the younger Mr. Florio was still in his 4 Times Square offices. His reaction to middle age, he said, has been to train for a 70-mile half Ironman triathlon scheduled for October. A slate-gray suit hugged his taut frame. “I like my wife, so I don’t want a 20-year-old girlfriend,” he said. “It’s much cheaper than a Porsche, and you end up looking a lot cuter in the end.”

Low-speed endurance training, he said, takes adjustment. “If you’re used to racing,” Mr. Florio said, “it’s a pain in the ass to go slow.”

He continued: “When I’m in the park on my bike and someone passes me, it’s like, ‘I’ll kill you!’ Like yesterday I was in the Park and I rode about 25 miles, and I was doing this low-heart-zone thing. And this guy passes me, and I’m like—I saw him on the back hill, and I was like, ‘You know what? I just got to kick his ass on the hill.’

“So I came from behind him, and I was like, Vrrrrrrum! And then I went back into my low heart rate.”

Such is restraint, Florio-style.

“Tom’s the last little bit of [that generation],” Mr. Galotti said. “The reality is, there’s been a change in the company. Condé Nast went from a business that was run on superficial success to one that’s operated more on real financial success.”

Under his hard-charging brother, Tom Florio was widely seen as being on the losing end of an asymmetric sibling rivalry—leading to his highly public transfer from the president’s seat at The New Yorker back to his former position as publisher of Condé Nast Traveler. Mr. Florio, however, denied that interpretation. “Believe me,” he said, “[Steven] had nothing to do with me moving in and out of The New Yorker, because I reported directly to Si [Newhouse].”

Yet answering to Steven Florio, he said, did mean that he “scaled back a little bit my kind of prima-donna thing, which I was a little more comfortable with before he was there. You know, it’s a lose-lose situation. It’s like, he would say no to everything, where before he was here, everybody said yes to me.”

Mr. Florio downplayed the idea of a cultural change at 4 Times Square. “I’ve been here since 1983 and I’ve been a publisher for a good amount of that time,” he said. “Si is as involved as he’s always been—the company is bigger, is what’s different. It’s not that he’s not involved. There were how many magazines then, seven? Today there’s 20-something …. Believe me, when we sit down and talk to Mr. Newhouse, and talk about a creative idea or a business idea, there’s not a question he doesn’t think to ask that’s like, you better be on game.”

And in the present climate, Mr. Florio’s own role is evolving. He is drawing up staffing plans for a Men’s Vogue business department apart from Big Vogue’s. The test issue is fat with premium advertising. “We have Hinckley Yachts,” Mr. Florio said, “and we have [Ralph Lauren] Purple Label, and $1,400 single-malt scotch …. We have brands that don’t advertise. We did 164 pages—when the budget was 70, right?”

If the newsstand sales are comparably strong, Mr. Florio plans to bring on a publisher for the men’s title. He declined to say whether that would move him into a group-publisher position overseeing the entire Vogue family. At present, the two-year-old Teen Vogue is under publisher and V.P. Gina Sanders—the wife of Si Newhouse’s nephew Steven Newhouse, a leading candidate to succeed Mr. Newhouse when he eventually retires.

“There are a lot of options right now,” Mr. Florio said. “I think Teen Vogue is doing just fine. We haven’t made any decisions about if Men’s Vogue would become part of a group situation or not. This is all in discussion right now. We’ll make decisions based on what’s best for the brand and what’s best for the company.”

And what’s best for the brand, in Mr. Florio’s estimation, is to get beyond that glossy 800-page annual monument. The inspiration, in part, was In Style—the only fashion magazine, Mr. Florio said, to rival Vogue’s ad-page count.

“And the only reason In Style gets up there,” he said, “is because of all their supplements—which they do brilliantly. I am not putting them down.

“If anything,” he continued, “it made us think, ‘Wait a minute, our brand is pretty damn important. Maybe [we] should extend our brand and get into that business.’”

In Style? Somewhere, under an immaculately tasteful headstone, one could almost hear Diana Vreeland spinning like a gyroscope. Attention, ladies: In Style is the new Vogue?

Not at all, according to Mr. Florio. Citing Malcolm Gladwell and tipping-point theory, he described his theory of Vogue’s role—as “a brand that has both change agents and masses reading it.”

Most magazines, he said, have one or the other class. “In Style doesn’t have change agents, they have masses,” he said. “Vanity Fair has change agents …. In Vogue, you have the fashion elite, the society elite, as well as that woman out there in Minneapolis who might go to H and M or whatever.”

And so you have a brand capable of expanding into a multidimensional experience. “One of the things about Vogue and the Vogue brand,” Mr. Florio said, “we’re as active off the page, in the design studio, consulting the C.E.O. who the next designer should be, as we are on the page. Actually, we’re more. I call Anna the McKinsey of fashion, because she is like McKinsey in the way she advises people.”

McKinsey? Is that whizzing noise Ms. Vreeland again?

The consulting work, Mr. Florio said, “was about what we do. It was about our taste and our style.”

“The limits of the Vogue brand,” Mr. Florio said, “will be dictated by our taste.”

New York Times pundit standings, Aug. 9-15

1. Frank Rich, score 25.0 [no rank last week]

2. Paul Krugman, 22.0 [rank last week: 1st]

3. Maureen Dowd, 17.5 [no rank]

4. David Brooks, 11.0 [3rd]

5. Bob Herbert, 3.0 [tie—5th]

6. (tie) Nicholas D. Kristof, 0.0 [4th]

John Tierney, 0.0 [tie—5th]

Maureen Dowd bounced back from book leave with the No. 2 column on the week’s Most E-Mailed list, a piece pegged to the news of war-protesting mother Cindy Sheehan. No stockpiled evergreens for Ms. Dowd! But Paul Krugman outbattled Ms. Dowd for second place overall, through sheer consistency and endurance; his bolus of mid-scoring columns included one held over from the previous week. And speaking of consistency: As the summer roster kept shifting with the pundits’ vacation schedule, John Tierney moved from a scoreless tie for fifth place to a scoreless tie for sixth place. You could set your watch by Mr. Tierney—if you lived someplace where it was always 0:00 o’clock.

—Tom Scocca

Correction: The Aug. 8 Off the Record story about Lachlan Murdoch’s resignation from his News Corp. duties stated that Mr. Murdoch’s job of supervising Fox’s television station group had been “reassigned to Fox News boss Roger Ailes.” After the publication of the item, representatives of Fox News contacted Off the Record multiple times to state that the claim was false. As of Aug. 8, according to Fox News, Mr. Ailes had not been put in charge of the station group. Mr. Ailes was put in charge of the station group on Aug. 15. “When you wrote it, it was wrong,” said Fox News spokesperson Irena Briganti. Off the Record regrets the error.

Billing itself at “800 Pages” (though paginated to 802), the upcoming September Vogue falls shy of last year’s 832-page performance. The ritual “Biggest Issue Ever!” cover line is absent. Still, Mr. Florio had bigger things to count than pages.

“How do I feel about it?” Mr. Florio asked. “I feel good about it.” He eased forward in his leather armchair and picked it up, savoring the heft.

The 2005 September issue, Mr. Florio said, “has brought in more revenue for a monthly magazine than probably any magazine ever published in the world—since the cavemen.”

The cavemen, or other literal-minded folk, might be confused by the publisher’s definition of “magazine”: The $2 million revenue increase that Mr. Florio is reporting to the Publisher’s Information Bureau includes some money from Men’s Vogue, which will make its newsstand debut—still, officially, as a test product—in September, with its older sister as chaperone.

The bookkeeping fits with Mr. Florio’s concept of Vogue: a brand that can’t be contained by two covers, even when those covers are 1 1¼8 inches apart. Hence the second publication on Mr. Florio’s coffee table: a Vogue marketing brochure, cut bigger than a tabloid newspaper, with a translucent bluish-white plastic cover.

The lush pages feature trippy, larger-than-Vogue versions of iconic Vogue photographs—including Annie Leibovitz’s December 2003 Wonderland shoot, with John Galliano as the mad Queen of Hearts to Natalia Vodianova’s flamingo-toting Alice. They also contain Mr. Florio’s blueprint for transforming Vogue from a women’s fashion title to “a world of experiences,” encompassing “dynamic multi-media platforms.”

The brochure touts, among other offerings, the Vogue documentary, Seamless, which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in April; plans for a theatrical release are ongoing. There’s also the Shopvogue.com Web site—roll over the ads and click to buy!—the syndicated television programming available in 78 million homes, the party planning group, the data-mining initiatives, and the in-house advertising studio for clients such as Bergdorf Goodman, Cartier and Cointreau (“campaigns … that pair unique ideas with the same incredible photographers and stylists who distinguish our editorial pages”).

And—oh, yeah—there are the magazines: Men’s Vogue, Teen Vogue and, if Mr. Florio has his way, Vogue Living sometime next year. And naturally, beyond and beneath it all, holding up the edifice: Anna Wintour’s Vogue, also known around headquarters as “Big Vogue.”

Even if it’s the teensiest bit not so big—or at least not so Biggest! From January through July, Vogue’s ad pages were down 2.5 percent compared to the same period last year, according to the Magazine Publishers of America.

As a stainless-steel coffee maker gurgled in the corner of his 12th-floor corner office, Mr. Florio made his case for alternative measures. “I have a file in my drawer, I could throw down every fashion magazine and show you what people are paying in their March issue,” he said. “And their discounts are between 68 and 80 percent to buy ads in these other magazines. What’s $150,000 in Vogue is literally $16,500 in another magazine …. I don’t look at their ads. They’re just giving away ads. The whole idea of tracking ads is absurd today because they don’t mean anything.”

Rival publishers disputed Mr. Florio’s claims of widespread cut-rate advertising. “We don’t discount,” said Stephanie George, president of In Style. “We work for a very big company called Time Inc., and they don’t need me to do that.”

Still, this year, Vogue raised its rate base—the circulation guaranteed to advertisers—to 1.2 million. “I get paid, and everyone who works for me gets paid, on revenue,” Mr. Florio said. “Not pages.”

For all his interest in the multimedia future, Mr. Florio is something of an atavistic figure: the last of a certain breed of Condé Nast publisher. Of the three “Italian Guys”—Mr. Florio, his brother Steven and “Mr. Big” Ron Galotti—who lunched annually at Da Silvano in Decembers throughout 90’s, Tom Florio is the only one still holding an active day-to-day position in the company.

His hot-blooded older brother stepped down as Condé Nast C.E.O. in January 2004; Mr. Galotti, the Vogue publisher from 1994 to 1998, retreated in March 2004 to a 100-acre farm in North Pomfret, Vt.

But the younger Mr. Florio was still in his 4 Times Square offices. His reaction to middle age, he said, has been to train for a 70-mile half Ironman triathlon scheduled for October. A slate-gray suit hugged his taut frame. “I like my wife, so I don’t want a 20-year-old girlfriend,” he said. “It’s much cheaper than a Porsche, and you end up looking a lot cuter in the end.”

Low-speed endurance training, he said, takes adjustment. “If you’re used to racing,” Mr. Florio said, “it’s a pain in the ass to go slow.”

He continued: “When I’m in the park on my bike and someone passes me, it’s like, ‘I’ll kill you!’ Like yesterday I was in the Park and I rode about 25 miles, and I was doing this low-heart-zone thing. And this guy passes me, and I’m like—I saw him on the back hill, and I was like, ‘You know what? I just got to kick his ass on the hill.’

“So I came from behind him, and I was like, Vrrrrrrum! And then I went back into my low heart rate.”

Such is restraint, Florio-style.

“Tom’s the last little bit of [that generation],” Mr. Galotti said. “The reality is, there’s been a change in the company. Condé Nast went from a business that was run on superficial success to one that’s operated more on real financial success.”

Under his hard-charging brother, Tom Florio was widely seen as being on the losing end of an asymmetric sibling rivalry—leading to his highly public transfer from the president’s seat at The New Yorker back to his former position as publisher of Condé Nast Traveler. Mr. Florio, however, denied that interpretation. “Believe me,” he said, “[Steven] had nothing to do with me moving in and out of The New Yorker, because I reported directly to Si [Newhouse].”

Yet answering to Steven Florio, he said, did mean that he “scaled back a little bit my kind of prima-donna thing, which I was a little more comfortable with before he was there. You know, it’s a lose-lose situation. It’s like, he would say no to everything, where before he was here, everybody said yes to me.”

Mr. Florio downplayed the idea of a cultural change at 4 Times Square. “I’ve been here since 1983 and I’ve been a publisher for a good amount of that time,” he said. “Si is as involved as he’s always been—the company is bigger, is what’s different. It’s not that he’s not involved. There were how many magazines then, seven? Today there’s 20-something …. Believe me, when we sit down and talk to Mr. Newhouse, and talk about a creative idea or a business idea, there’s not a question he doesn’t think to ask that’s like, you better be on game.”

And in the present climate, Mr. Florio’s own role is evolving. He is drawing up staffing plans for a Men’s Vogue business department apart from Big Vogue’s. The test issue is fat with premium advertising. “We have Hinckley Yachts,” Mr. Florio said, “and we have [Ralph Lauren] Purple Label, and $1,400 single-malt scotch …. We have brands that don’t advertise. We did 164 pages—when the budget was 70, right?”

If the newsstand sales are comparably strong, Mr. Florio plans to bring on a publisher for the men’s title. He declined to say whether that would move him into a group-publisher position overseeing the entire Vogue family. At present, the two-year-old Teen Vogue is under publisher and V.P. Gina Sanders—the wife of Si Newhouse’s nephew Steven Newhouse, a leading candidate to succeed Mr. Newhouse when he eventually retires.

“There are a lot of options right now,” Mr. Florio said. “I think Teen Vogue is doing just fine. We haven’t made any decisions about if Men’s Vogue would become part of a group situation or not. This is all in discussion right now. We’ll make decisions based on what’s best for the brand and what’s best for the company.”

And what’s best for the brand, in Mr. Florio’s estimation, is to get beyond that glossy 800-page annual monument. The inspiration, in part, was In Style—the only fashion magazine, Mr. Florio said, to rival Vogue’s ad-page count.

“And the only reason In Style gets up there,” he said, “is because of all their supplements—which they do brilliantly. I am not putting them down.

“If anything,” he continued, “it made us think, ‘Wait a minute, our brand is pretty damn important. Maybe [we] should extend our brand and get into that business.’”

In Style? Somewhere, under an immaculately tasteful headstone, one could almost hear Diana Vreeland spinning like a gyroscope. Attention, ladies: In Style is the new Vogue?

Not at all, according to Mr. Florio. Citing Malcolm Gladwell and tipping-point theory, he described his theory of Vogue’s role—as “a brand that has both change agents and masses reading it.”

Most magazines, he said, have one or the other class. “In Style doesn’t have change agents, they have masses,” he said. “Vanity Fair has change agents …. In Vogue, you have the fashion elite, the society elite, as well as that woman out there in Minneapolis who might go to H and M or whatever.”

And so you have a brand capable of expanding into a multidimensional experience. “One of the things about Vogue and the Vogue brand,” Mr. Florio said, “we’re as active off the page, in the design studio, consulting the C.E.O. who the next designer should be, as we are on the page. Actually, we’re more. I call Anna the McKinsey of fashion, because she is like McKinsey in the way she advises people.”

McKinsey? Is that whizzing noise Ms. Vreeland again?

The consulting work, Mr. Florio said, “was about what we do. It was about our taste and our style.”

“The limits of the Vogue brand,” Mr. Florio said, “will be dictated by our taste.”

—Gabriel Sherman

New York Times pundit standings, Aug. 9-15

1. Frank Rich, score 25.0 [no rank last week]

2. Paul Krugman, 22.0 [rank last week: 1st]

3. Maureen Dowd, 17.5 [no rank]

4. David Brooks, 11.0 [3rd]

5. Bob Herbert, 3.0 [tie—5th]

6. (tie) Nicholas D. Kristof, 0.0 [4th]

John Tierney, 0.0 [tie—5th]

Maureen Dowd bounced back from book leave with the No. 2 column on the week’s Most E-Mailed list, a piece pegged to the news of war-protesting mother Cindy Sheehan. No stockpiled evergreens for Ms. Dowd! But Paul Krugman outbattled Ms. Dowd for second place overall, through sheer consistency and endurance; his bolus of mid-scoring columns included one held over from the previous week. And speaking of consistency: As the summer roster kept shifting with the pundits’ vacation schedule, John Tierney moved from a scoreless tie for fifth place to a scoreless tie for sixth place. You could set your watch by Mr. Tierney—if you lived someplace where it was always 0:00 o’clock.

—T.S.

Correction: The Aug. 8 Off the Record story about Lachlan Murdoch’s resignation from his News Corp. duties stated that Mr. Murdoch’s job of supervising Fox’s television station group had been “reassigned to Fox News boss Roger Ailes.” After the publication of the item, representatives of Fox News contacted Off the Record multiple times to state that the claim was false. As of Aug. 8, according to Fox News, Mr. Ailes had not been put in charge of the station group. Mr. Ailes was put in charge of the station group on Aug. 15. “When you wrote it, it was wrong,” said Fox News spokesperson Irena Briganti. Off the Record regrets the

Billing itself at “800 Pages” (though paginated to 802), the upcoming September Vogue falls shy of last year’s 832-page performance. The ritual “Biggest Issue Ever!” cover line is absent. Still, Mr. Florio had bigger things to count than pages.

“How do I feel about it?” Mr. Florio asked. “I feel good about it.” He eased forward in his leather armchair and picked it up, savoring the heft.

The 2005 September issue, Mr. Florio said, “has brought in more revenue for a monthly magazine than probably any magazine ever published in the world—since the cavemen.”

The cavemen, or other literal-minded folk, might be confused by the publisher’s definition of “magazine”: The $2 million revenue increase that Mr. Florio is reporting to the Publisher’s Information Bureau includes some money from Men’s Vogue, which will make its newsstand debut—still, officially, as a test product—in September, with its older sister as chaperone.

The bookkeeping fits with Mr. Florio’s concept of Vogue: a brand that can’t be contained by two covers, even when those covers are 1 1/8 inches apart. Hence the second publication on Mr. Florio’s coffee table: a Vogue marketing brochure, cut bigger than a tabloid newspaper, with a translucent bluish-white plastic cover.

The lush pages feature trippy, larger-than- Vogue v ersions of iconic Vogue photographs—including Annie Leibovitz’s December 2003 Wonderland shoot, with John Galliano as the mad Queen of Hearts to Natalia Vodianova’s flamingo-toting Alice. They also contain Mr. Florio’s blueprint for transforming Vogue from a women’s fashion title to “a world of experiences,” encompassing “dynamic multi-media platforms.”

The brochure touts, among other offerings, the Vogue documentary, Seamless, which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in April; plans for a theatrical release are ongoing. There’s also the Shopvogue.com Web site—roll over the ads and click to buy!—the syndicated television programming available in 78 million homes, the party planning group, the data-mining initiatives, and the in-house advertising studio for clients such as Bergdorf Goodman, Cartier and Cointreau (“campaigns … that pair unique ideas with the same incredible photographers and stylists who distinguish our editorial pages”).

And—oh, yeah—there are the magazines: Men’s Vogue, Teen Vogue and, if Mr. Florio has his way, Vogue Living sometime next year. And naturally, beyond and beneath it all, holding up the edifice: Anna Wintour’s Vogue, also known around headquarters as “Big Vogue.”

Even if it’s the teensiest bit not so big—or at least not so Biggest! From January through July, Vogue’s ad pages were down 2.5 percent compared to the same period last year, according to the Magazine Publishers of America.

As a stainless-steel coffee maker gurgled in the corner of his 12th-floor corner office, Mr. Florio made his case for alternative measures. “I have a file in my drawer, I could throw down every fashion magazine and show you what people are paying in their March issue,” he said. “And their discounts are between 68 and 80 percent to buy ads in these other magazines. What’s $150,000 in Vogue is literally $16,500 in another magazine …. I don’t look at their ads. They’re just giving away ads. The whole idea of tracking ads is absurd today because they don’t mean anything.”

Rival publishers disputed Mr. Florio’s claims of widespread cut-rate advertising. “We don’t discount,” said Stephanie George, president of In Style. “We work for a very big company called Time Inc., and they don’t need me to do that.”

Still, this year, Vogue raised its rate base—the circulation guaranteed to advertisers—to 1.2 million. “I get paid, and everyone who works for me gets paid, on revenue,” Mr. Florio said. “Not pages.”

For all his interest in the multimedia future, Mr. Florio is something of an atavistic figure: the last of a certain breed of Condé Nast publisher. Of the three “Italian Guys”—Mr. Florio, his brother Steven and “Mr. Big” Ron Galotti—who lunched annually at Da Silvano in Decembers throughout 90’s, Tom Florio is the only one still holding an active day-to-day position in the company.

His hot-blooded older brother stepped down as Condé Nast C.E.O. in January 2004; Mr. Galotti, the Vogue publisher from 1994 to 1998, retreated in March 2004 to a 100-acre farm in North Pomfret, Vt.

But the younger Mr. Florio was still in his 4 Times Square offices. His reaction to middle age, he said, has been to train for a 70-mile half Ironman triathlon scheduled for October. A slate-gray suit hugged his taut frame. “I like my wife, so I don’t want a 20-year-old girlfriend,” he said. “It’s much cheaper than a Porsche, and you end up looking a lot cuter in the end.”

Low-speed endurance training, he said, takes adjustment. “If you’re used to racing,” Mr. Florio said, “it’s a pain in the ass to go slow.”

He continued: “When I’m in the park on my bike and someone passes me, it’s like, ‘I’ll kill you!’ Like yesterday I was in the Park and I rode about 25 miles, and I was doing this low-heart-zone thing. And this guy passes me, and I’m like—I saw him on the back hill, and I was like, ‘You know what? I just got to kick his ass on the hill.’

“So I came from behind him, and I was like, Vrrrrrrum! And then I went back into my low heart rate.”

Such is restraint, Florio-style.

“Tom’s the last little bit of [that generation],” Mr. Galotti said. “The reality is, there’s been a change in the company. Condé Nast went from a business that was run on superficial success to one that’s operated more on real financial success.”

Under his hard-charging brother, Tom Florio was widely seen as being on the losing end of an asymmetric sibling rivalry—leading to his highly public transfer from the president’s seat at The New Yorker back to his former position as publisher of Condé Nast Traveler. Mr. Florio, however, denied that interpretation. “Believe me,” he said, “[Steven] had nothing to do with me moving in and out of The New Yorker, because I reported directly to Si [Newhouse].”

Yet answering to Steven Florio, he said, did mean that he “scaled back a little bit my kind of prima-donna thing, which I was a little more comfortable with before he was there. You know, it’s a lose-lose situation. It’s like, he would say no to everything, where before he was here, everybody said yes to me.”

Mr. Florio downplayed the idea of a cultural change at 4 Times Square. “I’ve been here since 1983 and I’ve been a publisher for a good amount of that time,” he said. “Si is as involved as he’s always been—the company is bigger, is what’s different. It’s not that he’s not involved. There were how many magazines then, seven? Today there’s 20-something …. Believe me, when we sit down and talk to Mr. Newhouse, and talk about a creative idea or a business idea, there’s not a question he doesn’t think to ask that’s like, you better be on game.”

And in the present climate, Mr. Florio’s own role is evolving. He is drawing up staffing plans for a Men’s Vogue business department apart from Big Vogue’s. The test issue is fat with premium advertising. “We have Hinckley Yachts,” Mr. Florio said, “and we have [Ralph Lauren] Purple Label, and $1,400 single-malt scotch …. We have brands that don’t advertise. We did 164 pages—when the budget was 70, right?”

If the newsstand sales are comparably strong, Mr. Florio plans to bring on a publisher for the men’s title. He declined to say whether that would move him into a group-publisher position overseeing the entire Vogue family. At present, the two-year-old Teen Vogue is under publisher and V.P. Gina Sanders—the wife of Si Newhouse’s nephew Steven Newhouse, a leading candidate to succeed Mr. Newhouse when he eventually retires.

“There are a lot of options right now,” Mr. Florio said. “I think Teen Vogue is doing just fine. We haven’t made any decisions about if Men’s Vogue would become part of a group situation or not. This is all in discussion right now. We’ll make decisions based on what’s best for the brand and what’s best for the company.”

And what’s best for the brand, in Mr. Florio’s estimation, is to get beyond that glossy 800-page annual monument. The inspiration, in part, was In Style—the only fashion magazine, Mr. Florio said, to rival Vogue’s ad-page count.

“And the only reason In Style gets up there,” he said, “is because of all their supplements—which they do brilliantly. I am not putting them down.

“If anything,” he continued, “it made us think, ‘Wait a minute, our brand is pretty damn important. Maybe [we] should extend our brand and get into that business.’”

In Style? Somewhere, under an immaculately tasteful headstone, one could almost hear Diana Vreeland spinning like a gyroscope. Attention, ladies: In Style is the new Vogue?

Not at all, according to Mr. Florio. Citing Malcolm Gladwell and tipping-point theory, he described his theory of Vogue’s role—as “a brand that has both change agents and masses reading it.”

Most magazines, he said, have one or the other class. “ In Style doesn’t have change agents, they have masses,” he said. “ Vanity Fair has change agents …. In Vogue, you have the fashion elite, the society elite, as well as that woman out there in Minneapolis who might go to H and M or whatever.”

And so you have a brand capable of expanding into a multidimensional experience. “One of the things about Vogue and the Vogue brand,” Mr. Florio said, “we’re as active off the page, in the design studio, consulting the C.E.O. who the next designer should be, as we are on the page. Actually, we’re more. I call Anna the McKinsey of fashion, because she is like McKinsey in the way she advises people.”

McKinsey? Is that whizzing noise Ms. Vreeland again?

The consulting work, Mr. Florio said, “was about what we do. It was about our taste and our style.”

“The limits of the Vogue brand,” Mr. Florio said, “will be dictated by our taste.”

New York Times pundit standings, Aug. 9-15

1. Frank Rich, score 25.0 [no rank last week] 2. Paul Krugman, 22.0 [rank last week: 1st] 3. Maureen Dowd, 17.5 [no rank] 4. David Brooks, 11.0 [3rd] 5. Bob Herbert, 3.0 [tie—5th] 6. (tie) Nicholas D. Kristof, 0.0 [4th] John Tierney, 0.0 [tie—5th]

Maureen Dowd bounced back from book leave with the No. 2 column on the week’s Most E-Mailed list, a piece pegged to the news of war-protesting mother Cindy Sheehan. No stockpiled evergreens for Ms. Dowd! But Paul Krugman outbattled Ms. Dowd for second place overall, through sheer consistency and endurance; his bolus of mid-scoring columns included one held over from the previous week. And speaking of consistency: As the summer roster kept shifting with the pundits’ vacation schedule, John Tierney moved from a scoreless tie for fifth place to a scoreless tie for sixth place. You could set your watch by Mr. Tierney—if you lived someplace where it was always 0:00 o’clock.

—Tom Scocca

Correction: The Aug. 8 Off the Record story about Lachlan Murdoch’s resignation from his News Corp. duties stated that Mr. Murdoch’s job of supervising Fox’s television station group had been “reassigned to Fox News boss Roger Ailes.” After the publication of the item, representatives of Fox News contacted Off the Record multiple times to state that the claim was false. As of Aug. 8, according to Fox News, Mr. Ailes had not been put in charge of the station group. Mr. Ailes was put in charge of the station group on Aug. 15. “When you wrote it, it was wrong,” said Fox News spokesperson Irena Briganti. Off the Record regrets the error.

So forget Marc or Calvin for the moment. "I was reading this obituary about Saul Bellow when he died, in The Times, and they had this quote in there, and it said-and I'll read it to you-I've got it here," Mr. Fielden said, on the phone from his office in the Condé Nast tower.

Mr. Fielden read: "He admired and befriended Chicago's deal-makers and real-estate men, and he dressed like one of them in bespoke suits and Turnbull and Asser shirts. He was a devoted, self-taught cook, as well as a gardener, a violinist and a sports fan."

An octogenarian Nobel laureate as lifestyle muse? Mr. Sammler's Sommelier?

"It's about breadth," the 35-year-old Mr. Fielden said, "rather than narrowing a magazine based on the expectations on what fashion or style make you have to conform to."

There are two separate sets of expectations for Mr. Fielden's project. Financially, Men's Vogue is shaping up as a straightforward big-ticket Condé Nast launch: 300,000 copies are planned for its Sept. 6 debut, with an ad-page count somewhere over 100. Vogue publisher Tom Florio said he suspects Men's Vogue will outpace April's company-record 106-ad-page launch of Domino.

Conceptually, however, Men's Vogue is a more mysterious proposition. Vogue has already produced one successful American spin-off, Teen Vogue, in 2003. It's one thing, though, to create a version of an iconic women's magazine pitched to girls. It's another to make one pitched to men.

"Clearly, this is a brand extension," Mr. Fielden said. But as macho brand names go, doesn't Men's Vogue sound more or less like Men's Ladies' Home Journal?

"I understand the skepticism some may have about whether a brand that means women's fashion to so many people can be made into something men feel comfortable reading," Mr. Fielden said.

Mr. Fielden said that the magazine is not aiming for the service-oriented, you-can-do-this tone that most men's magazines use to woo fashion-phobic consumers. It will assume that the Men's Vogue reader already possesses a confident, educated eye-an eye not unlike that of Anna Wintour.

The Vogue editor is "around the corner whenever I need to consult with her," Mr. Fielden said. "She's ready to give advice whenever she feels like she needs to give it, and whenever she feels she can improve upon what it is we've already done to make it better."

At 4 Times Square, Mr. Fielden-Ms. Wintour's arts editor for six years-is currently shuttling between Vogue's 12th-floor offices and his own space on the sixth floor. That lower level holds a 12-member staff (nine of them men, if anyone's counting). Many of the magazine's contributors, however, are Vogue staff. And Ms. W. is a short elevator ride away.

"She's the guiding hand in the way that you would expect someone with the title of editorial-whatever her title is-of a magazine, in the Condé Nast tradition of [Alexander] Liberman."

Ms. Wintour's title at the new magazine is "editorial director." That was the rank the legendary Liberman held at Condé Nast as a whole-outranking, among others, the editor of Vogue. But Mr. Liberman's lineal descendant, Condé Nast editorial director Thomas Wallace, does not directly oversee Vogue. With the men's and teen titles, then, Ms. Wintour is in the process of building her own corporate fiefdom.

Ms. Wintour's newest property would appear to encroach on the turf of existing Condé Nast men's magazines GQ and Cargo-as well as Details and Vitals, two titles published by Fairchild (like Condé Nast, a subsidiary of Advance Publications). Mr. Florio declined to name the advertisers that had signed on for Men's Vogue's debut (they will include companies offering yachts, planes and financial services, among others, he said), but he dismissed the notion that the magazine will be competing with the other titles.

"The majority [of Men's Vogue advertisers] are niche luxury brands that don't advertise at Condé Nast at all," Mr. Florio said. "It's a whole new mix of businesses we've brought in."

Mr. Fielden said that the idea for Men's Vogue originated with S.I. Newhouse, who approached Ms. Wintour with the notion back in September. Men's editions of Vogue have been published in Italy since 1968 and in France since 1975.

In March, Mr. Fielden shared a prototype with what he described as "lawyer/banker types" in focus-group sessions in New York, Los Angeles and Chicago. The research convinced Condé Nast to greenlight a one-issue launch, with 100,000 copies on newsstands and 200,000 more being mailed to select consumers in Condé Nast's database: men over 35, with incomes north of $100,000. If sales go as anticipated, Mr. Florio said, Men's Vogue will follow up with four more issues in 2006.

"The overwhelming connotation that Vogue had as a brand among these guys was of taste, worldliness, intelligence and authority," Mr. Fielden said. "And that's an incredible thing to capitalize on and to go out there with."

"The idea for Men's Vogue," Mr. Florio said, "when we looked out there, we felt the high end of the luxury market, as magazines [for men] were concerned, had been abandoned. That men's magazines all went younger over the last five years or so. Everything was about youth, youth, youth. Yet, clearly there's a guy out there on the arm of the women at the Met Ball. You know, who is he?"

A: Saul Bellow!

"This is not a reader who is interested to know about the latest purple sandals to come down the runway," Mr. Fielden said. "This is a guy who is much more tuned into what a good suit can convey. And a good coat. And solid shoes. And you know, there's a recognition on our part as editors that being well-dressed can get you through the door, but to go beyond that requires polish of a more lasting kind."

That means no fitness tips and no diagrams of how to tie a Windsor knot. Both Mr. Florio and Mr. Fielden made efforts to distance their magazines from GQ and the stable of men's magazines currently on the market.

"There will be no abs, no beer," Mr. Fielden said. "There will be women, but they won't be young starlets. They'll be treated in a completely different way."

David Zinczenko, editorial director of Best Life and editor in chief of Men's Health, defended the value of how-to journalism for the over-35 demographic. "At Best Life, we're in the business of making better men, not just clothing them," he said. " … They can make the guy in the suit look better; we can make them be better."

Mr. Fielden also said that celebrities will be handled judiciously and "one at a time" under his stewardship.

That philosophy hasn't stopped the Men's Vogue marketing materials for advertisers from showcasing a cavalcade of celebs: Jake Gyllenhaal with a polo pony, Gael Garcia Bernal baring his chest, Bono modeling a leather coat and Lance Armstrong, splashed with water, pedaling a bike-naked.

"I'm 35. I'm married," Mr. Fielden continued. "I worked at The New Yorker for eight years. I was the arts editor at Vogue for six years and I didn't feel like there was a men's magazine I could relate to."

To that end, the debut issue of Men's Vogue will draw on Vogue and New Yorker writers, editors and photographers. The issue will include pieces by Vogue food critic Jeffrey Steingarten, New Yorker staff writers John Seabrook and Michael Specter, Times of London food critic A.A. Gill, New Yorker Talk of the Town deputy editor Nick Paumgarten and Vogue and New Yorker contributor Tom Shone. Mr. Fielden said his photographer roster includes Mario Testino, Annie Leibovitz, Raymond Meier and Norman Jean Roy.

"The real goal here is to find a way to marry the great writing with the great photography," Mr. Fielden said, "and find a way to gather together, if you will-and give us time-a kind of generation that hasn't been gathered together within the pages of one magazine. That would be my goal as an editor, ultimately, not go big-game hunting for the global literary names-though I wouldn't shun any-and to find the ones who are really coming up."

Readers who think Vogue means women modeling clothes miss the point, Mr. Fielden said. "When they start to look at it, they see there is great food writing, there's great travel writing, there's great cultural stuff. There's great architecture. I would expect we would take the subjects that seem appropriate from Vogue and build on them as well," he said. "Anna realizes this is something that can become-that has to become-its own thing."

And Ms. Wintour isn't done building. Mr. Florio said that the Vogue editor has already created another prototype for a magazine to be called Vogue Living, dealing with "travel, home, architecture, and apparel."

"She's had it for some time now," Mr. Florio said. " … Assuming the market is positive, and we're in a good business climate next year, 2006, we'll certainly endeavor to get an issue out by at least the end of next year."

-Gabriel Sherman

Westward, hos! One group of would-be authors has heartily embraced the news that publisher Judith Regan is planning to move her ReganBooks imprint from New York to California: members of the West Coast porn business.

"Almost everyone in the adult-entertainment industry" has come after Ms. Regan with a pitch, ReganBooks spokesperson Paul Crichton said.

"Whether we're going to do anything, that's a whole different story," Mr. Crichton said.

Ms. Regan's success with last year's Jenna Jameson's memoir, How to Make Love Like a Porn Star-coupled with the announcement in April that she's taking her piece of HarperCollins to the backyard of the porno industry-has apparently inspired adult-film performers to climb out of the tangled sheets and put pen to paper.

"I have been a huge fan of hers for years, because I admired the way she clawed and scratched her way up in what I considered a man's world," said Jody Maxwell, the star of Expose Me, Lovely and The Devil Inside Her, among others. "I admire her gutsiness …. I think that she is tough and strong and she came up through the ranks."

Ms. Maxwell recently self-published My Private Calls, an account of 12 years she spent with a company she described as "the Rolls-Royce of phone sex." She kept notes on every call she ever took, she said-60 notebooks' worth.

And Ms. Maxwell has several more books in her, she said, including her memoirs. At this month's BookExpo America in New York, she managed to corner Ms. Regan for a lengthy conversation.

"She has an aura about her," gushed Ms. Maxwell. "I think it's an aura of self-confidence and success. I think she found me a little bit interesting. Before I got into porn, I was a Republican. I've been a guest at the White House. Plus now I teach school. She thought I was kind of fascinating."

"Women in porno now see Judith Regan as their friend and as an idol," said Dian Hanson, the sexy-book editor at L.A.-based Taschen Books. Ms. Hanson spent years editing "men's sophisticates" magazines such as Leg Show and Juggs before getting into the book business.

Contrary to popular opinion, Ms. Hanson said, open hard-covers could often be glimpsed on many adult-film sets, and many of the actors are big readers.

"You gotta do something when you're sitting between your scenes," Ms. Hanson said. "You might have three, four hours from having sex with one person until you've got to have sex with another. Everyone says, 'Bring a book.'"

Several porn stars, contemplating literary growth opportunities, suggested that Ron Jeremy-the featured talent in Anal Jeopardy, Frankenpenis and other classics-was long overdue to write his life story.

Awakened by a phone call after a late night on a film set, a bleary-sounding Mr. Jeremy said he had in fact just signed a deal with HarperCollins (though not with ReganBooks) to produce his memoirs.

"There's a lot about me that people don't know," Mr. Jeremy said, adding that he'd been approached many times before by publishers, but that he "always hung up the phone on them."

This time, he said, with Josh Behar as his acquiring editor-Mr. Behar having previously published a book by Traci Lords-it finally felt right.

Mr. Jeremy added that he wouldn't be doing much of the actual writing himself, because he was too busy. As for his advance, Mr. Jeremy said, "I got a little less than Jenna Jameson, and that bugged me. They told me that the reason is she's a girl."

- Sheelah Kolhatkar

New York Times pundit standings, June 14-20

1. Paul Krugman, score 20.0 [rank last week: 3rd]

2. Thomas L. Friedman, 18.0 [1st]

3. Nicholas D. Kristof, 12.0 [4th]

4. David Brooks, 8.0 [tie-5th]

5. Stacy Schiff, 5.0 [no rank]

6. Bob Herbert, 3.5 [tie-5th]

7. Frank Rich, 2.0 [2nd]

8. John Tierney, 0.0 [tie-5th]

So much for the notion that good news sells: Nicholas D. Kristof's June 14 column about the Pakistani government's imprisonment and mistreatment of gang-rape victim Mukhtaran Bibi grabbed the No. 2 overall spot on the week's Most E-Mailed list; Mr. Kristof's June 19 follow-up column about Ms. Bibi's release failed to make the chart at all. Such is the price of making the world a better place. Still, Mr. Kristof's overall performance was good enough for third place. In another blow to entrenched patriarchal structures, guest columnist Stacy Schiff raised The Times' female-pundit-to-male-pundit ratio from 0.0 to 0.14-and out-pointed three of the men in the process.

-Tom Scocca