In the next three months, Time Inc. will slash 280 jobs, whittling away at iconic titles like Sports Illustrated, Essence, and People. Time also underwent a big round of cuts in early 2007, but this is still major news. Why is it going over so quietly, especially in light of the wave of Condéfreude last month?According to documents filed with the New York State Department of Labor unearthed by Media Decoder, Time Inc. plans on laying off 280 employees in New York between November 2 and January 31. This is less than the 400-500 layoffs previous estimated by Media Decoder, and comprises about 3% of Time Inc.’s 9000 employees, but it’s still a body blow. This could be a canny move if the company is planning on getting webbier — and maybe even remerging with AOL — but its constrictive effects will no doubt ripple through the industry.

Details are still murky, but small-ish mag Fortune Small Business will close down entirely, and Sports Illustrated, People, Essence, and Entertainment Weekly will definitely face staff cuts. Gawker’s Ryan Tate reports that “Time Inc. will offer those who accept buyouts an additional 13 weeks of pay — three months! — in addition to two weeks of pay for every year of service.”

The contrast between the muted reaction to Time’s layoffs and the tooth-gnashing, garment-rending reaction to Condé Nast’s layoffs is revealing. News of Condé’s McKinsey audit provided a steady drumbeat of schadenfreude and vague dread throughout the summer. When Condé bit the bullet in October and announced that it was shuttering four magazines and it was reported that about 180 Condé employees were getting laid off, days of op-eds and condolences followed.

The closure of Gourmet, a beloved, authoritative 68-year-old title, had a lot to do with that; Fortune Small Business just doesn’t get the same sort of love. But more broadly, Condé is seen as a symbol of magazine work as a patrician undertaking. Even talk of minor budget cutbacks at Vogue or Vanity Fair, much less The New Yorker, sets off swoons and cackles among columnists, bloggers, and the Gawker commenting set. Time Inc. just doesn’t seem to have the same cachet. But that doesn’t lessen the collective loss to journalism as a large industry — and to the lives of its staffers — posed by its latest layoffs.

Now, on the eve of AOL’s split with Time Warner, a tipster tells Business Insider’s Nicholas Carlson that the heads of AOL and Time Inc. met for more than three hours to discuss a possible “co spin-off” from their parent company. From Carlson’s tipster:

Time Inc CEO Ann Moore and Tim (AOL) met last week with some of their confidants to talk about a potential “co spin-off” of the Time Inc and AOL. While synergies have been talked about in the past, turns out TW thinks that their could be serious benefit from this (you know what they are) merger and spin-off.

In the months leading up to the spinoff, AOL has made no secret of its desire to shift its focus to the “content business.” The company has a huge leg up thanks to its portal, AOL.com, which is capable of driving massive traffic to sites in its MediaGlow network with relatively low profiles off the Web, sites like Asylum, LemonDrop, and Politics Daily.

With more recognizable Time Inc. brands on the docket, they could at once burnish their reputation as a web publisher, boost their aol.com traffic, and give refuge to Time brands that are being beaten up by the current print environment. There would be some issues of precedence. For instance, if AOL owned Sports Illustrated, would their well-trafficked in-house sports blog FanHouse be folded in, or would it retain a separate identity? Wallet Pop versus Fortune, People versus PopWatch … the list goes on. With a baseline of guaranteed web traffic, would underperforming Time Inc. print publications go Web-only en masse? How many employees on each side would be considered redundant and likely get fired?

These are nuts-and-bolts questions worth asking, but in the abstract, a merger would present a lot of juicy opportunities, and not just for content-hungry AOL. Whereas AOL was the obvious loser in the AOL-Time Warner merger, Time Inc. would be the loser unit this time around, hence the tipster’s key line that “TW thinks that their could be serious benefit from this.” Wrapping Time Inc. in with AOL would give Time Warner an exit strategy with respect to its troubled print unit, and would have the bonus effect of giving Jeff Bewkes an escape hatch from his comments to the effect that Time Inc. is too precious to sell to a third party.

Carlson says the deal “makes sense,” but is skeptical: “we agree that there’s a very low chance of this deal being successful given the cultural difference between the companies.  It would just be a mini-AOL-Time Warner all over again.” Would it, though? The focus seems a lot narrower this time; there’s a lot more synergy between a company that wants to reinvent itself as a web publisher and a (still overwhelmingly) print publishing company. At this point, the odds are still against this happening, but now that AOL knows what it is and knows what it wants to be, Gerald Levin‘s and Steve Case‘s synergistic vision of ten years ago seems a lot less like a pipe dream.