What happens, subscribers know, is that you build a pile of New Yorkers that you mean to get to. At some point, you get a new issue in the mail while you’re still working through the previous week’s. You’ve read about up to the film reviews, maybe, but the fresh new issue is hard to resist. So you put the unfinished one aside. A week later, that once-fresh issue joins it – maybe this time you skipped the fiction or the theater review. Then two months have passed and you have a stack of nearly ten magazines. You’re drowning, surfacing to suck in the new Talk of the Town with ragged gasps, desperate for the one-week reprieve that follows a double issue.

Over time, the covers of these magazines that sit around become inadvertently associated with moments in your life. This may sound melodramatic, but it isn’t. Seeing even an unexceptional cover can, weeks later, bring to mind the issue’s contents, or something that happened while it lay unfinished on your coffee table, or the train ride in which you read it.

The magazine is intentional about the iconography of its covers. About a third of the time, they’re topical to the political or cultural moment. Occasionally, the illustration on a cover becomes iconic. The cover at left, for example, or this one, which graces the shower curtain in my apartment, or this one, which has been duplicated forty-five billion times (estimate). For an institution rightly proud of its literary heritage, the New Yorker store is almost entirely comprised of prints of covers and cartoons.

On the magazine’s website, the covers serve as icons branding an issue. It’s a smart design decision that recognizes the ways in which readers make issues personal. That cover icon does several things: it reminds the reader of his personal associations with the issue, it acts as an advertisement for the print in the store, and it often reinforces the era (or specific moment) of the issue’s release.

An example. Diving into Calvin Trillin’s past contributions I came across this article:

Any New Yorker recognizes the significance of that cover; many may in fact remember it. Even if you can’t make out the date, you could probably place it within five years. (It’s from February 1993.) Every article in the issue shares that icon, that brand, tying them all together and to that moment, disparate though the article topics may be.

What’s most evocative, though, are the intangible personal connections people have to those covers. Which is why the magazine’s iPad app is so jarring. Despite Conde Nast’s well-publicized challenges with its tablet products, the New Yorker app is a well-executed if spartan implementation of the magazine’s content with some interactive supplements. And if you’re reading an article and close the app, when you return you’re right back where you were. Very user-friendly.

But the cover image is all-but-absent. In the view from which you select an issue to read, as at right, there it is. Once you click on ‘View’ and enter the magazine, it’s gone, rarely to be seen again. You won’t have it sitting on a table in your house for a week or two. The image becomes transitory: the wrapper to a package, cover art to an album that never leaves your CD player. Even the application icon doesn’t reflect the newest issue; instead, it’s Eustace Tilley standing watch, as he has for a century.

The next iteration of Apple’s iPhone and iPad operating system, iOS 5, will change how newspapers and magazines are presented (and bought) on the devices. Instead of a separate app, issues will appear in the Newsstand, which will, according to preview images, feature a tiny but identifiable icon of each issue, resting on a small, virtual bookshelf.

That will help – but it probably doesn’t matter anyway. New Yorker covers as icons are all but doomed. Online distribution has already scattered the magazine’s contents to the wind and diversified the content the magazine produces. For a visitor to the magazine’s website, the cover is unimportant, an ancillary to the article akin to the cartoon that the site reflexively serves up. The New Yorker, like all publications, isn’t consumed as a curated album, it’s shared as a number of hit singles, with website-only bonus tracks.

For an institution so proud of its history and content, the shift away from strongly identifiable covers will take some adjustment. Readers, for their part, will lose the associations that could have been stirred by future covers, but you can’t miss something that doesn’t yet exist. What they’re unlikely to miss is that guilt-inducing pile at their bed sides. Stacking up unread copies of digital publications, after all, is not a chore to be dealt with. It’s the way we live online.

Some readers will also miss the iconic covers because they are shopping for a new shower curtain. But those folks will have to fend for themselves.

If anyone could do it, Adobe could. Company founders John Warnock and Chuck Geschke brought the world desktop publishing – a concept now so familiar that it doesn’t require explanation. Create a document, hit print; what comes out is what you see on your screen. Adobe would now bring that simplicity to print, the web, video, mobile devices – without having a separate workflow for each medium.

To accompany this bold vision, Adobe developed a press toolkit and embarked on a worldwide tour to share the vision with publishers in Munich, Paris, London, and Tokyo. (Then an Adobe employee, several others, and I joined him.) The effort was summed up with this video:

Create once, publish anywhere.

It was ambitious. Including mobile devices was premature – part of the wizardry of the live demonstration on the tour was showing a brand-new Nokia model that could actually display a very low-res video.

Then came the iPad. Last year, the company produced this video.

That value proposition seem familiar? Using Adobe tools, you can port your magazine content – now, to a mobile device that can handle it, the iPad.

If only it were that easy.

Earlier this week, the New York Observer blasted Conde Nast – and, in particular, Scott Dadich, the company’s vice president of digital magazine development – for the “stalling out” of the company’s much-touted strategy to transition its properties from print to the iPad.

When that strategy was first proposed, though, Dadich was seen as a “savior” to the company – at least according to… the Observer. The hagiography went something like this: Dadich (in a San Francisco coffee house, natch) has a vision for an interactive version of Wired that could leverage a then-nonexistent tablet. He sketches it on a napkin, and the company signs on.

Dadich starts working with Adobe on a demo, running on the Adobe AIR platform, powered by Adobe Flash. A demonstration of what an interactive Wired could look like debuts at SxSW in March, 2010 – to rave reviews. A star is born.

By that point, Apple had announced the iPad – and that the iPad would not run Adobe Flash. The ubiquity of Flash meant that Wired’s in-house designers already knew the technology; it’s what traditionally powers online interactivity. Now, though, a version of Wired for the iPad will have to come in another form – a form that’s novel for both Conde Nast and Adobe. The first edition of Wired for iPad comes out in May 2010; lauded by Adobe and to decent reviews. In October, the companies form an official partnership.

Meanwhile, Adobe is struggling to make its value proposition real. It pledges to Conde Nast that it can use variants of its existing publishing suite, including InDesign, to produce magazine versions for the iPad (and other platforms). Create once, publish anywhere. But as they’re developing the first Conde Nast apps, Apple keeps changing the rules for iPad publishing – at one point, even specifically disallowing Adobe’s nascent publishing tool. Developing software takes time, even when the rules are set. Here, Adobe was trying to adapt existing tools to present content on a platform that was brand new and outside of its control. Meanwhile, the company had to continue to assert that it could make the Conde Nast transition happen to demonstrate the value of the tools it was still building.

Dadich clearly didn’t expect these roadblocks. The Observer notes:

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.

Those “workflow specialists” aren’t identified. But it’s easy to assume that they came up from Adobe’s San Jose headquarters. A report from Business Insider goes to an an insider who says that “while ‘there was a real collaboration between his team and Adobe’ and ‘[Dadich] really oversaw the design,’ Adobe handled the technical details.” Which they’d have to: the in-house team couldn’t create interactive tools natively in Flash, so they’d be reliant on Adobe’s still-in-development Flex platform.

In the initial video promoting the tablet version of Wired, Dadich notes that it’s “just adding one more avenue” – though the complexity of the displayed belies the simplicity of that statement.

At the SxSW presentation, Dadich lauded the existing team who’d be tasked with producing the multiple versions. Reuters’ Felix Salmon noted:

Dadich kicked off his presentation by showing a photo of the large art and design team at Wired, and noting that the website can’t boast anything like that kind of staffing dedicated to making articles look good and read well online.

Dadich clearly thought that team, in partnership with Adobe, would be enough. From the Observer:

[T]here 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 core question is: why would he think the existing team would suffice?

The expectations put on Dadich were massive, to be sure, and he appears to have made a commitment to bringing in tablet versions of Conde Nast properties with a substantial injection of resources. But he was working with a partner that, for the past decade, has predicated its value to publishers in large part on facilitating precisely these sorts of transitions. (It is worth noting that the first iPad app of Wired was nothing short of a huge success, selling more than 100,000 downloads at full newsstand price, which outpaced the newsstand sales of its analog version.)

Network publishing, after all, never really worked. There are significant platform differences between print and the web, and obvious content differences between video and text. Having a pool of assets from which different media could draw is valuable, but the presumption that you could create once and publish anywhere – in a way that is easier and less resource intensive than having different production streams – hasn’t panned out. And doesn’t seem likely to any time soon – particularly on immature and new platforms. What tablets bring to the publishing world is a both new platform and new forms of content. It’s adding to the difference pool, not reducing it, and differences add time.

Caught between lofty expectations from his employer (and his peers in publishing) and a company publicly committed to using Conde Nast as a proof-of-concept, Dadich had very little room to maneuver. Publishing on the iPad hasn’t stopped; Wired and the New Yorker keep appearing to customers, as expected. But the grand vision of a simple multi-platform publishing system powered by Adobe tools has been elusive.

Just as it has been for a decade.

Philip Bump is an expert on many digital publishing platforms. He used to be a senior designer at Adobe Systems, Inc., makers of inDesign, Flash and Photoshop.

During a morning press event at Condé Nast Times Square offices today, Bob Sauerberg, the Executive Vice President, Consumer Marketing spoke to the importance of the timeless property of Gourmet and Conde’s partnership with digital consultants Activate, who were tasked with re-imagining the brand experience of Gourmet. The end result? Gourmet Live, which will plan go live in the fourth quarter of this year.

The specific plans for Gourmet Live are in its earliest iteration, but judging purely by the savvy rhetoric, Conde Nast executive seem to know what they are doing. Current plans, announced by Activate’s Anil Dash essentially focus on “suffusing the really great content in the Gourmet with tradition, with state-of-the-art social media, networking and collaborative game playing engine,” all on a digital tablet platform or iPad. Yes, collaborative game playing and geocentric alerts (think FourSquare-enabled Gourmet) all coming from a 100 year-old Conde brand. Good news indeed.

Looking back at the last year for Conde, this can only be viewed as really good news. There was much gnashing of teeth and roaring of roars from the legion of loyal Gourmet readers when Condé Nast announced that it would be shuttering the title last year. Loyal (and technologically advanced) fans will surely be thrilled with news of the brand’s resurrection.

Condé Nast digital strategists should be lauded for not just saving Gourmet, but also unveiling some very smart thinking in leveraging the Gourmet brand and content as a means to transition from the static content delivery schedule of once a month, to a live user-generated content engine that enables a new experience every time a user logs on. And while strategy is smart, the tactics needs some work (as the video demo is not embeddable at time of publishing.) To see the demo check out the Gourmet Live blog.

Nonetheless, the announcement of Gourmet’s return is great news, not just for fans of the title, but for aficionados of quality and authoritative content as well.

Much has been made of the recent battles between Apple and Adobe, but to recap:

Apple recently announced restrictive new guidelines for the software platform that will run on their iPad. Most notably, the new tablet-based computing device does not allow Adobe’s Flash, claiming that it drains a devices battery life, slows down mobile access, and most importantly, is far too buggy a plug-in which causes Apple computers to crash far too often. Adobe responded by creating a work-around, which Apple has since forbade, essentially putting Adobe out in the cold from what seems to be a potentially lucrative new media platform.

How does this relate back to Wired? Well, the SF-based magazine was aggressive in pursuing a tablet based version of their title by partnering with Bay Area neighbor Adobe, which at the time, seemed to be a wise decision. In fact, we’ve lauded the efforts of both Editor-in-chief Chris Anderson and Dadich as providing a vision in an industry that has been sorely lacking one.

However, now it appears that the Wired‘s eggs are placed in the Adobe basket, a basket that will likely work on many other tablet devices, just not the one that is breaking sales records and defining the next wave of media consumption. Its too early to call it a blunder, but it does call to question the strategic leadership at Wired, a magazine that is perfectly suited to both report on, and exist on, the new device.

In a piece entitled Apple’s New Guidelines Won’t Stop Wired Magazine for Ad Age, Nat Ives reports:

Condé Nast ‘s Wired magazine app will indeed work on the iPad despite the restrictive new guidelines Apple issued this month, Condé Nast said this evening. That’s depending on Apple’s actual approval, of course, but Conde is at least confident it can meet the new guidelines that had worried many observers.

Wired has been working with Adobe, which provides many magazines’ publishing software, to develop interactive editions to run on tablet computers including the iPad. Its goal was to integrate publishing the print edition with publishing the tablet edition as closely as possible, minimizing the need for additional steps or systems to produce a tablet edition.

Without any specifics provided, and in the context of this bleeding-edge era of tablets, software, and vaporware we now find ourselves, its hard to put any real stock in a comment claiming that they expect Wired to work on the iPad, depending on Apple’s actual approval. When reached for comment about how the battle between Apple and Adobe would effect Condé Nast titles (especially Wired) a spokesperson at Conde Nast declined comment.

Sources close to the situation claim that the research and development phase for Condé’s tablet version has two product tracks, one using technology developed in-house by Condé Nast Digital specifically for iPhones and iPads, and the other using technology developed with Adobe for multiple devices and operating systems. This is a smart approach, especially given the heightened rhetoric between Apple and Adobe.

It’s theoretically possible that Apple will approve their next app — Condé is not asking for special treatment, they’ve just said that they’ll work within Apple’s restrictions. But right now, it’s honestly hard to imagine an Adobe-powered version of Wired (or any title for that matter) showing up on an iPad anytime soon.

Of course, none of this means that Condé Nast wasn’t smart to partner with Adobe, its just that no one, not even Wired, predicted Apple’s incredibly restrictive guidelines coming. It also means that their Adobe partnership does not really mean much of anything at this point, essentially putting at least this development track back to square one.

Wired rocks audience at SXSW with iPad demo from Mangrove on Vimeo.

Following is the original demo of the Wired tablet version released in February.

CONDÉ NAST TO MOVE ALL OPERATIONS FOR W MAGAZINE OUT OF THE FAIRCHILD FASHION GROUP

New York, NY, March 17, 2010 – Condé Nast will move all editorial and business operations for W magazine out of the Fairchild Fashion Group, it was announced today by Charles H. Townsend, President and C.E.O. of Condé Nast.

Patrick McCarthy will continue in his role as Chairman of the Fairchild Fashion Group through the end of the year. As part of the restructuring, Thomas J. Wallace, Editorial Director of Condé Nast, will name an Editor-in-Chief of W.

The senior editorial staff currently shared by W and WWD will now exclusively work for WWD. Edward Nardoza, Editor-in-Chief of WWD, will now report to Gina Sanders, President and C.E.O. of the Fairchild Fashion Group.

“This formally establishes a structure for W consistent with our other consumer magazine titles, and allows FFG the autonomy to focus on their core business-to-business publications and related businesses,” Mr. Townsend said.

Fairchild Fashion Group includes WWD, WWD.com, Footwear News, Fairchild Summits, Fairchild Books, and trade shows.

Condé Nast is a division of Advance Publications. In the United States, Condé Nast publishes 18 consumer magazines, two trade publications and 27 websites.

A spokeperson from Conde Nast emailed us earlier today to say that Obama never made that phone call to Woods, and that the information was ” a misunderstanding between the writer and a trusted source.” This follows Conde’s other snafu of putting both Obama and Woods on the cover of Golf Digest the month of the scandal with the headline “10 Tips Obama Could Take From Tiger.” (Hey, at least it wasn’t “10 Tricks.”) No word yet on if Bill Clinton actually made the call.

For such a mainstream print media association, acquiring talents developed at the shamelessly vulgar, hilariously quirky self-described “friendly little warblog” is a bold step to take, even if the simultaneous hirings were unintentional. While Cox has overshadowed her role as the blog’s founder with many other distinguished lines on her resume and Weiner will be tempted to stray from her political pedigree at a cultural institution like Vanity Fair, both writers are direct products of a new medium that has directly caused a great number of headaches at newspapers and magazines. That their training ground was on the freewheeling extreme of the already irreverent blogophere goes beyond a statement: it’s a commitment to keep one foot in the murkier waters of the political world and attracting a new audience to talent bred online, possibly hoping the favor will be reciprocated. Welcoming Cox to GQ was of particular political signficance, as Michael Calderone explains at Politico. It is a sign the magazine would like a greater voice in the political media community, and “looks like a way for the magazine to maintain more of a daily presence in the capital.”

The influx of bloggers into the print world their existence threatens to destroy is a good sign for the latter, and an olive branch to the former indicating that perhaps there can be some form of peaceful coexistence. Conde Nast has nothing to lose from the merger, and blogs like Wonkette are becoming, in their own way, polished and seasoned institutions that can be trusted to produce “Conde Nast-level” talent.

The problem is, the iPad cannot currently do what the demo presents, and it should, right now. Flash is the only current technology that would make that possible.

Apple is betting on HTML5 as the method for developing iPad content.  However, HTML5 isn’t ready to provide the tools to provide rich interactive applications, like a virtual Sports Illustrated magazine. Apple won’t allow brilliant content creators to be creative because they have failed to at least provide the option to use Flash on the device. This has nothing to do with the iPad designed as something other than a normal computer, it has everything to do with it needing to be a one stop-and-shop piece of entertainment technology. It simply can’t because Apple won’t support the authoring tools required

Steve Jobs blames Adobe for why he won’t adopt Flash.

“They are lazy. They have all this potential to do interesting things but they just refuse to do it. They don’t do anything with the approaches that Apple is taking, like Carbon. Apple does not support Flash because it is so buggy, he says. Whenever a Mac crashes more often than not it’s because of Flash. No one will be using Flash, the world is moving to HTML5.”

The problem, Steve, is that HTML5, the next iteration of HTML, is not ready for prime time yet and won’t be for many years. Standards take decades to be adopted and there currently aren’t any authoring tools for HTML5 that allow us to develop the same rich interactive content that Flash provides.

Apple has always prided themselves on design noted for what it leaves out, allowing devices to focus on the task they were meant for. However, Apple seemingly has no good strategy for content creators to build what Flash provides.

The reason why the publishing world, particularly newspaper and magazine people, were disappointed with the initial presentation of iPad, was because the focus of the device should have been a game changing way to present their content. Initially, I blamed the publishers, but soon realized, Apple isn’t providing any means to create this content. Leading up to the release, it seems they didn’t bother to work with content creators, so Apple could truly come out of the gate showing people the potential the iPad has to change the media landscape.

Apple should have worked with these content providers to have demonstrations of content that is heavy on video and interactive infographics. Smarter designers, developers, and writers could have created content that would have us all drooling over getting our hands on this device. Instead we were left wondering, what happened?

Anthony De Rosa is a veteran blogger who has been developing and providing consulting for new media since 1996. He posts his opinions on a variety of topics, social media and politics in particular, at soupsoup.tumblr.com.

Last fall, a hacker broke into Conde Nast’s computer system, flinging early copies of GQ, Vogue and other publications all over the Internet. To prevent further breaches of trust and budget, Conde set up the Fraud Reporting Hotline.

According to the memo sent by Chief Financial Officer John Bellando, employees are encouraged to turn in anyone guilty of “release of proprietary information, accounting/audit irregularities, falsification of company records, theft of goods/services/cash,” and “unauthorized discounts/payoffs.”

Publishers have been hit hard by this this perfect storm of ad recession combined with digital revolution, and Conde Nast is no exception. So — this is a very smart move.  But you have to admit: it sounds a little like a twisted psych experiment, the stuff of horror films and Lost.* All I can say is don’t piss off  the smoke monster. Or Anna Wintour.

*We’re gonna need some answers, Lost producers.

According to a press release today, the December issue of GQ, on sale for $2.99, was downloaded 6,641 times, while the January issue nearly doubles that with around 12,000 downloads up to now. Modest figures at first glance, though Condé highlights the growth, as well as vague “engagement metrics” meant to measure how much time each customer is spending with the digital issue.

February’s issue is available now, priced at $2.99, while repeat customers will be tempted with a $1.99 app price beginning with the March issue.

In all, it’s far too soon to say whether the experimentation is working. With a one title test group and only two months of sales, the digital versions remain a giant question mark, despite Condé’s predictably optimistic praise of growth.

Advertising Age, meanwhile, notes that revenue totals “less than $60,000,” mocking that as “a rounding error at the consumer magazine giant” and comparing the GQ circulation totals that were obviously left out of the press release: “GQ‘s December issue sold 240,000 copies at newsstand and was delivered to another 667,851 print subscribers.” When put that way, digital sales are hardly a drop in the bucket, but remain an area of development worth keeping an eye on.

With big-name players folding left and right over the past 12 or so months – Conde Nast’s Gourmet, Cookie, Portfolio, Men’s Vogue, Domino and two bridal mags, PC Magazine, RADAR, Vibe, Blender and especially Playgirl, to name a few – plenty of mags have taken the hint, bulking up their web presence and lessening their reliance on ad page sales. Some have even gone as far as (wait for it…) charging viewers to access print content online.

While the publications industry is still suffering, some did post gains in the last year. Time Inc.’s People Style Watch is up 25%, as well as Bonnier’s wide-reaching foodie mag Saveur (up 12.6%) and Meredith’s Family Circle (up 11.5%). Though these successes don’t indicate the decline has bottomed out, Magazine Publishers of America’s Ellen Oppenheim said that ad sales showed improvement during this year’s last quarter compared to 2008.

The good news: Full-time unpaid internships are definitely still available.

You can listen to the full interview below, in the meantime here’s some some interesting takeaways:

• “I was actually supposed to go to Washington D.C. to promote the book on monday and he [Newhouse] called me on Sunday night and said ‘you can’t go to Washington, you need to be in the office tomorrow’…it was a done deal. It was a surprise to all of us. I knew that the ad situation was really bad but Conde Nast had been a supporter of the magazine in every way and I thought that they would continue to be.”
• How she informed her staff: “I went around from office to office and said ‘we’re having this meeting but you should know that it’s terrible news. We were all really very much in shock…we were out very quickly….That night I said everybody come to my house and called up Russ and Daughters and said we need lots of wonderful food! And lots of wonderful food came to the house.”
• “This has been a particularly bad time for print media. I don’t think there’s ever been a situation quite like this one [in the media world]…Our ad page drop was really precipitous.”
• “I am sure that The New Yorker will march on forever, as long as Si Newhouse has anything to say about it…as well it should. It would be a terrible loss for the world if the New Yorker folded.”
• Sigh: “We had actually already made the December issue and it didn’t get printed.”
• Those waiting for the Gourmet memoir (yes please!) will have to wait a while longer. Reichl is apparently working on a new book she thought would be about her time at Gourmet, but “it’s turned into something else…I think I need a little distance.”

As magazine’s struggled through 2009, Beckman was moved within the company last March after serving as president of Condé Nast Media Group. From arranging ad deals across Condé’s vast network to running Fairchild Fashion’s stable of titles includes Women’s Wear Daily, Beckman’s move was seen by many as a demotion — a veteran taking the fall for a devastating ad slump. The Post again:

Before moving to Fairchild, the media group under Beckman was believed to be responsible for about 80 percent of the ad revenue that flowed into the company.

Now, Beckman will transition to another huge company, but with a more niche product, in another move highly representative of the media marketplace at large. The newly launched e5 recently acquired a host of trade publications including The Hollywood Reporter, Billboard, AdWeek and MediaWeek, according to the Post.

The Hollywood Reporter confirmed reports today about its company’s new CEO:

Beckman said his career and passion have focused on music, entertainment and media, “making this collection of brands particularly alluring to me.” He added: “I look forward to developing these valuable brands and improving and extending them in the years to come.”

Koblin writes:

But … the days of Condé Nast licensing may not be far behind. There’s currently a push within 4 Times Square to expand the brands of the company’s most iconic magazines, and Condé Nast executives David Carey and Robert Sauerberg, are leading the charge.

This isn’t the first time the idea of licensing has been floated at Condé Nast, but it’s something that Si Newhouse has pooh-poohed in the past. The reasoning was simple: It cheapens the brand.

“Si has never bought into it,” said a Condé source.

With some tough budget decisions in their rearview mirror, the publishing giant deserves some credit for considering new and creative revenue streams. But Condé’s biggest loss of last year may not have been now-defunct titles Gourmet or Domino, nor may it have been the millions of lost revenue brought be an ad recession that absolutely killed the luxury market (on which so many of Condé Nast’s titles rely.)

No, the biggest loss of last year at Condé Nast is the myth that surrounds their august brand. And merchandising products through licensing arrangements sounds cheap — and isn’t likely to resurrect the once regal and mythological standing at 4 Times Square.

Fortunately, some have. Last week, we ran a poll of some of the contenders for Top Site of 2009: Politico topped our editorial list. Find out why, and see the runner-up and the winner of the poll, after the jump:

Winner: Politico

Sure, Politico has a print edition — with a mighty circulation of 32,000 — but its heart beats online. Given its prominence in the online discourse, it’s hard to believe that it launched in January of 2007, but its strategy of frenetic, up-to-the-minute coverage allowed it to quickly dwarf much older, much larger publications in its online footprint.

2009 was a transformative year for Politico: it weathered the inevitable post-election traffic downturn admirably; its executive editor, Jim VandeHei, was named to the Pulitzer Prize Board; and it became profitable (ironically, thanks in large measure to its print edition, according to Michael Wolff). According to paidContent, Politico had revenues of more than $20 million and profits of more than $1 million in 2009 — especially impressive given the relative lack of campaign advertising compared to last year. Politico’s parent company, Allbritton Communications, has certainly taken note: it announced that it would be launching a new DC news site in spring of 2010.

Politico is not without its detractors — Glenn Greenwald has accused it of deliberately puffing up conservative controversies in the name of traffic. But for finding a viable way to cover a topic as potentially poisonous as politics in a more or less nonpartisan way while garnering mainstream acceptance and acclaim, Politico has changed the game in 2009.

Runner-Up: Talking Points Memo

On the flip side of the coin is Talking Points Memo, which makes no bones about its “politically left perspective,” but which has blossomed into a vibrant, ever-expanding empire with hard journalistic bonafides. Last year, TPM was the first blog to ever win a Polk Award, for editor Josh Marshall‘s series on the politically motivated midterm dismissal of Department of Justice attorneys under the Bush Administration.

This year, TPM has continued to blaze a trail: it has reversed the old journalism paradigm by rolling out ambitious plans for expansion, putting out a call to hire a publisher, and — maybe the best mark of crossover success — earned Josh Marshall an invite to an off-the-record luncheon with President Obama, alongside heavyweights from The Washington Post, The New York Times, and CNN.

Readers’ Choice: Ars Technica

Thanks in large measure to strong Twitter support, Ars Technica dominated our reader poll with 30% of the votes, giving it a solid plurality (compare that to Politico’s 17% and TPM’s 8%). All of which underscores two of Ars’ greatest assets: love and loyalty.

The site has hit its speed bumps in ’09: in April, it reportedly laid off seven of its seventeen editorial staffers, a move which some criticized on management issues following Condé Nast’s acquisition of the site in late 2008. But when it comes to depth, and expertise, Ars still occupies a dominant space in the tech pantheon, and as 2010 beckons, it brings a heft and authority to bear that leaves most blogs in the dust.

2010 will be the year when we begin to consume media in a whole new way. It seems almost a foregone conclusion that Apple will release a device long lusted after by gadget geeks many are speculating will be called the iTablet. Conde Nast, Time magazine and others have already been working on how they will create content for this kind of device and they’re prepared move forward even if Apple isn’t.

Convergence between web content and television has never been done quite right. Web video has matured to the point now where people are beginning to go to their laptops before their television to catch up on programs they missed. They’re also watching original content on the web in record numbers. Content creators like fm78.net are finding the freedom and worldwide distribution the web provides without the hassle of dealing with pitching a television network to pick them up. Places like blip.tv are providing a platform for these creators with real methods to monetize their content. But how will we watch this content without having to sit down at our laptops? Sure, the tech savvy have already hacked their Mac Mini, Apple TV or XBox to do this, but when and how will the mainstream get their web video on their 50 inch plasma TV?

Enter Boxee.

At the end of 2009, a sold out event took place to reveal a device that wants to revolutionize how we consume media. Boxee collects the video you want from the web and provides it in a very slick interface that the average couch potato could manage to navigate, but with enough options to keep the power user happy as well. Unlike other devices who have tried the same, but were limited to few content providers, Boxee intends to allow the device to access virtually any video you can access from your computer. The device is scheduled to be released later this year.

The iTablet and Boxee could be a boon for folks who as of yet have had limited success monetizing content. As newspapers and magazines in their paper format continue to lose market share at alarming rates, their digital counterparts are still scrambling to find a real revenue model. Much like the way the iPod changed the way we pay for music, the iTablet could change the way we pay for newspapers and magazines.

The iTunes store and the Apple App store are game changing methods for charging for digital goods, the next logical step is to create a digital newsstand that could be access from an iTablet device. This digital newsstand could potentially revitalize traditional producers of paper media. People love the convenience of being able to buy music and applications from the palm of their hands, and the numbers prove it out. They’re likely to do the same when it comes to purchasing subscriptions to richly delivered content.

Instead of carrying around a stack of magazines and newspapers, they can have that great glossy look and feel that a laptop simply can’t provide. A tablet experience is much closer to the one we enjoy from sitting down and flipping through a magazine, but with the additional wow factor of being able to place video and interactive info graphics along with the text.

2010 could be the year we start to see the mainstreaming of not only consuming of web content on more convenient devices, but also the beginning of the end of lamenting how we can’t make money creating that content.

Anthony De Rosa is a veteran blogger who has been developing and providing consulting for new media since 1996. He posts his opinions on a variety of topics, social media and politics in particular, at soupsoup.tumblr.com.

An unattended van parked nearby for the last day has shut down all of Times Square. Surprisingly, NY One is not yet covering this story.

Fox News is reporting:

DEVELOPING: New York City police closed down part of Manhattan’s Times Square on Wednesday after authorities identified a suspicious vehicle, Fox News has learned.

Investigators have called in a bomb squad to examine a 1992 Dodge van with tinted windows that has been parked at the location for two days.

A placard from a nonexistent law enforcement agency is reportedly on the dashboard of the vehicle, which has no license plates.

Watch a live video stream of the action at Times Square here.

More as this story develops.

Photo Credit: Nick McGlynn

Writing in his Media Ink column, Kelly reports:

Condé Nast has corralled a pair of big-name Internet players in its bid to stop hackers from infiltrating the publisher’s computer network.

The owner of magazines like Vogue, The New Yorker and Bon Appetit, last week got permission from a federal judge to issue expedited subpoenas to Google and AT&T to try to obtain the identities of at least five hackers Condé claims are responsible for the breach.

The subpoenas are the latest chapter in S.I. Newhouse’s recently filed copyright infringement suit against the hackers who got their hands on material from Condé mags before publication, including GQ’s Men of the Year issue, and the December issues of Vogue, Lucky and Teen Vogue, which ended up on the Web site FashionZag.

The “Hulu for magazines” joint venture spearheaded by John Squires officially has a name: Next Issue Media. According to Folio, the partnership has some real heavyweights behind it: Time Inc., Meredith, Hearst, Condé Nast and News Corporation. All of which represent some serious old media muscle, but will they be able to compete in the digital marketplace?

AllThingsD’s Peter Kafka has a nice summary of the steep obstacles they will face, which include getting Amazon and Apple onboard and, well, creating a product that people want to buy:

They’ll have to convince consumers who already have billing relationships with Amazon, Apple and other vendors to sign up with yet another service.

They’ll have to convince device makers to play along with the strategy, which runs counter to many of their own plans. Both Amazon and Apple, for instance, have intentionally created closed systems that give them control of both devices and distribution.

They’ll have to create content consumers want to buy. The new product can’t simply be a digital version of the magazines they’re already printing: That’s already available on the Web, and consumers have shown almost no interest in paying for it, and advertisers haven’t fully embraced it either.

At that, the New York Observer‘s John Koblin reports that John Squires has been a powerful driving force behind the venture; what Squires can accomplish by sheer force of will should not be underestimated.

A quick GoDaddy search reveals that nextissuemedia.com is registered to CooperKatz & Company, a “New York based marketing and public relations firm specializing in technology, financial and professional services, trade associations and consumer products,” the name of which appears on some of the joint venture’s press releases.

Today, the day of reckoning is upon us as Condé Nast, Hearst, Meredith, News Corporation and Time Inc. have announced their plan to save the world, anti-trust laws be damned. (Let’s just assume their lawyers are better than ours.)

Here’s the prescription: all of the old white men from all of the companies will work together to “develop open standards” for a “digital storefront” — that is, or sounds like, the much ballyhooed iTunes for Magazines. Then comes the development of technology that will allow readers to “enjoy their favorite media content” on portable devices including phones, e-readers and laptops. From today’s press release:

The goal of this digital initiative is fourfold, to create: a highly featured common reading application capable of rendering the distinctive look and feel of each publication; a robust publishing platform optimized for multiple devices, operating systems and screen sizes; a consumer storefront offering an extensive selection of reading options; and a rich array of innovative advertising opportunities.

It’s as ambitious as ever, but when every competitor with money is all in, the risk is either enormous or nonexistent, depending on how you look at it. From a business standpoint, no company will likely be outdone by another because of the teamwork aspect. But if it fails, are we kissing magazines goodbye for good?

The project, as previously noted, will be headed by an interim leader, Time Inc.’s John Squires, who notes that “Once purchased, this content will be ‘unlocked’ for consumers to enjoy anywhere, anytime, on any platform.” It’s only the purchasing that sounds problematic, considering magazine websites can already be accessed “anywhere, anytime” on cell phones, computers, readers and even mp3 players. For free. But hopefully, the technological firepower this group will have at its disposal will work to improve on the current e-iterations we have. If it’s out there, this supergroup plans to perfect it.

And what of the money?

Advertisers will be able to utilize innovative formats that benefit from the highly engaging, interactive nature of this new medium. In addition to entirely new magazine and newspaper reading experiences, content selections may ultimately include books, comic books, blogs and other media.

Enjoy the free blogs while they last.

The full release is below:

LEADING PUBLISHERS FORM VENTURE TO OFFER CONSUMERS
NEW DIGITAL STOREFRONT AND PORTABLE READING EXPERIENCE

Initiative Will also Offer Marketers Rich Array of Innovative Advertising Opportunities

New York, NY, December 8, 2009 – Condé Nast, Hearst, Meredith, News Corporation and Time Inc. today jointly announced that they have entered into an independent venture to develop open standards for a new digital storefront and related technology that will allow consumers to enjoy their favorite media content on portable digital devices.

The goal of this digital initiative is fourfold, to create: a highly featured common reading application capable of rendering the distinctive look and feel of each publication; a robust publishing platform optimized for multiple devices, operating systems and screen sizes; a consumer storefront offering an extensive selection of reading options; and a rich array of innovative advertising opportunities.

Beyond the publications of the equity partners, the venture will welcome other publishers to offer their content via this new digital platform. Publishers will derive revenue from content and advertising sales, as well as from print subscriptions.

“For the consumer, this digital initiative will provide access to an extraordinary selection of engaging content products, all customized for easy download on the device of their choice, including smartphones, e-readers and laptops,” explained John Squires, the venture’s interim managing director. “Once purchased, this content will be ‘unlocked’ for consumers to enjoy anywhere, anytime, on any platform.”

For publishers and advertisers, the venture will offer an attractive, cost-efficient, consumer-focused environment. Advertisers will be able to utilize innovative formats that benefit from the highly engaging, interactive nature of this new medium. In addition to entirely new magazine and newspaper reading experiences, content selections may ultimately include books, comic books, blogs and other media.

For the hardware, software and retail industries, the initiative will provide dynamic new business opportunities by organizing a library of quality content with a common format and technical specifications. The venture partners represent an unduplicated audience of 144.6 million according to Mediamark Research & Intelligence (MRI). By the end of 2010, Forrester Research estimates that 10 million e-readers will be sold in the U.S., and according to m:Metrics (comScore), there will be over 50 million smartphones in the U.S. by the end of 2010.

Some of the biggest rivals in magazine publishing are close to a deal that would combine their forces in an effort to resuscitate a dying print industry. Titans of the media world — including Condé Nast, Heart and Time Inc. — are working to form an alliance that would recreate magazines for a digital age, in a plan that includes new mobile iterations sold in an iTunes-like store, as well as print magazines, according a report in The Observer. It’s like a publisher’s version of Voltron.

That means most of the country’s largest, most influential magazines — People, Time, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker — all in one place, so desperate to survive this Great Print Depression that one group no longer believes they can provide the fix that will put them ahead of their peers. The only way we’ll get out of this, they seem to be saying, is if we all pour every resource into the reinvention of a medium. Together.

Leaked Time Inc. memos hinted at such a supergroup back in September, revealing the consideration of an alliance to compete with devices like Amazon’s Kindle. “Handwritten notes indicate Time Inc. executives have discussed the new venture with other magazine publishers, including Conde Nast, Meredith, and Hearst,” reported one source.

Now, the deal is “imminent.” In his piece, Observer media maven John Koblin reveals Time Inc.’s John Squires as the interim chief of the project, charged with “generating interest” and insisting publishers “pull together.” The anonymous sources Koblin uses to bolster his case seem optimistic, but cautious and vague:

“The really, really hard part is that you’ve got so many different kinds of devices running on different operating systems. And how do you handle that? The consortium provides one point of contact for the consumer. When you come to the main store, you can get the content any way you want.”

And though Squires refused to comment for the piece, Koblin added relevant quotes past interviews with the Time Inc. digital futurist:

“With magazines, the form has to change,” [Squires] continued. “All I’m saying is that there are ways to design magazines differently for that kind of experience that’ll be attractive and will feel different to a consumer.”

It smells too big to fail, but is the innovation there? If the names being tossed around are a proper indication, money won’t be an issue, but as a consumer, you’re left waiting, hoping the ideas will follow.

In a time when the media landscape more than resembles a graveyard, everyone at Bloomberg is upbeat and optimistic. Oh, and ambitious. “We want to be the world’s most influential news organization,” says Andrew Lack, the chief of Bloomberg television, radio and “dot-com endeavors.”

It’s also an expert example of how good big media companies are at being covered by other big media companies, even down to breaking down the fourth wall of journalism and admitting the public relations manipulations happening right before the readers’ eyes: “Oh, my! I don’t want to sound as if I’m on message,” one employee says, “laughing apprehensively while also sending a ‘help me’ look to a Bloomberg spokeswoman nearby.” It’s almost scientific.

Then the Times gets in on the meta-something game, referencing itself as a counterpoint about the state of big media:

Publishing giants like Condé Nast, Time Inc. and The New York Times, with their veteran scribes and rich histories, have laid off people and scaled back. Bloomberg may lack the pedigree and gloss of some of its rivals, but it has one thing they don’t right now: money to throw around.

The cash-heavy company is playing news like the Yankees play baseball, buying up stars that have gotten too expensive for their struggling brands, recruiting “refugees” from the Wall Street Journal and Fortune. Plus there are new bureaus “in places like Ecuador and Abu Dhabi.” Wordly!

Its editorial staff (which includes radio, TV and Web site workers) now numbers 2,200, compared with 1,250 journalists at The Times and 1,900 at Dow Jones (a figure that includes the newswires and the Journal staff).

The four-page feature takes the reader through the BusinessWeek purchase (“Bloomberg opened its wallet and snatched it away from circling private equity firms in October for just $5 million in cash”) and their new readership vision (“Main Street readers and, much more important for Bloomberg, senior executives, government leaders and other global movers and shakers”).

But then comes the excess and uncontrollable flashbacks to the days of excess that got publishers like Condé Nast into the position they’re in now:

Employees snack on free kiwis and pomegranates and gulp fancy sodas. The company even employs full-time bathroom attendants to wipe up errant droplets of water on the countertops.

It almost sounds like an alternative universe until the reveal: “Although Bloomberg, which is privately held, draws attention for its media ambitions, a vast majority of the company’s projected $6.3 billion in revenue — and nearly all of its profit — derives from financial information systems.”

A-ha! With news as a secondary business, things flourish. Otherwise? Not so much. And that doesn’t mean it will be fun!

[T]he place can still come across as something of a white-collar, digital sweatshop — terminals and ID cards, for example, closely monitor employees’ comings and goings.

But don’t get it twisted: “This is not an old-media company,” Mr. Lack says. “We’re a new kid on the block in a new world order.”

The entire feature is well worth a read, if only for how mind-bendingly different it is than any other media stories of recent months. It might hurt your head.

(photo via Daniel Acker/Bloomberg News)

Hire a consultant, sure. Hire a turnaround expert, someone who can help you maximize the web. That one would have been useful, oh, three years ago. Or two years ago. Or one year ago. But of all the things to spend dwindling resources on besides town cars, they’re going with a PR crisis manager?

I need to calm down for a sec. From the Post:

CONDÉ Nast CEO Charles Townsend and Chairman S.I. Newhouse, Jr. are turning to Washington, DC-based crisis manager and media coach Michael Sheehan to help with PR.

Sheehan has coached Democratic presidential candidates from Bill Clinton to Barack Obama. He handled AIG during its near-death experience and JP Morgan in its acquisition of Chase.

A source said that Newhouse and Townsend were reluctant to make the hire, but did so under prodding from Lucky publisher Gina Sanders, who used Sheehan when she was launching Teen Vogue…morale at Condé has hit an all-time low. This year it has folded an unprecedented six magazines, including Gourmet and Cookie, and fired at least 460 employees. Its glitzy image has also taken a drubbing on Madison Avenue.

Here, let me save them some money: When your company’s “glitzy image” is part of the reason there’s so much schadenfreude about all the cuts you’ve had to make, maybe best PR move would have been to NOT hire the expensive PR manager.

It’s a little late to put a shine on this spin, I think. What is Condé going to do, un-shutter Gourmet ? Un-squander millions on Portfolio? Un-ignore the web from back when everyone was saying, “Why is Condé Nast ignoring the web?”

Un-spending money on frivolous things is a start; the cancellation of the annual Si Newhouse Christmas Luncheon & Seating Plan is a sad sign of the times but certainly appropriate given the jobs that have been cut. But the sad recent history of Condé Nast seems more like bad decisions following more bad decisions. It didn’t take a genius to figure out that there were spending issues at Condé. Maybe those might have been addressed before bringing in McKinsey, which presumably did not perform their services pro bono.

It may, on the other hand, have taken a genius to figure out that the Cookie, Gourmet, Portfolio and even Domino brands were worth something apart from glossy paper — clearly, because no one at Condé Nast seemed to have figured that out. (Domino — there is still nothing to replace it, especially for all those people aging into housing upgrades. Sheesh.) As my colleague Glynnis MacNicol has said, “Parsing the logic of Condé’s decisions is a frustrating game, one which we may not have to play much longer considering the pace at which the company is ridding itself of titles.”

Logic doesn’t matter so much when everyone’s rolling around in money. But things are different now, and Conde Nast has more than just its prestige glossy rep to preserve – there are jobs and people at stake, too. And customer who are already missing their favorite magazines. It may be Si Newhouse’s to screw up but its all of ours to lose.

Condé Nast hires crisis intervention expert [NYPost]

Related:
Why Did Time Inc.’s Layoffs Get So Much Less Attention Than Condé’s?[Mediaite]
McKinsey Bell Tolls: Condé To Shutter Gourmet, Cookie, Modern Bride [Mediaite]
Condé’s Cuts Come to Vogue [All Things D]
Chairman’s focus on glossies cost Gourmet dearly [AdAge]

Last month brought the news that struggling publisher Condé Nast would be closing a few of its titles altogether, including the much-loved Gourmet. To mark the end of the food mag’s life, associate art director Kevin DeMaria decided to document the dour proceedings, turning the closing into a memorial ceremony of sorts, which he dubbed The Last Days of Gourmet.

DeMaria, whose personal website can be found here, had the following comment in addition to his somber pictures of boxes and empty hallways:

DeMaria’s shots have a detached sadness to them, capturing the antiseptic side of office life in a failing industry. It’s a representative freeze-frame — relics, if you will — of a tough time that will be remembered as such thanks to those, like DeMaria, who have documented the decline from inside.

>>>NEXT: Check out a few more of DeMaria’s shots from the end of Gourmet…
(via PDN)

Fortunately, Mediaite has come up with some costume suggestions for you. Pulled straight from the headlines, these are guaranteed to be hits:

For obvious reasons, the current president of the United States is likely to be a popular Halloween costume this year. But beyond form-fitting Hart Schaffner Marx suits, the challenge remains: How is a trick-or-treater supposed to pull off the look?

Fortunately, cable pundit/voice of reason Glenn Beck is on the case. A well-executed Obama according to Glenn Beck’s imagination should wear a Che Guevara t-shirt, a Hitler mustache, and a Soviet-style ushanka, preferably bearing a red hammer-and-sickle. Gasoline can for torching the Average American optional.

Barack Obama, According to Keith Olbermann’s Imagination

Cable pundit/voice of reason Keith Olbermann, on the other hand, might have slightly different ideas about what constitutes a good Obama costume. Olbermann’s Obama should have billowy, flowing wings, a resplendent halo, and, if budget allows, a heavenly host of sanctified Cabinet appointees carrying blazing swords and playing gleaming trumpets, singing the praise of the anointed one, and also mentioning offhandedly that Bush kind of sucked.

Summer of Death

Year-by-year, the Grim Reaper is always a popular Halloween costume, particularly among people who don’t have any costume ideas when they go to Party City on October 30th and kind of just phone it in. But coming off the Summer of Death, the costume has a special resonance this year. A (sexy) black hood, (sexy) black robe, and (sexy) blood-dripping scythe are of course mandatory, but how to work in the contemporary angle? It would probably be in poor taste to carry photos of Michael Jackson, Ted Kennedy, Farrah Fawcett, Walter Cronkite, etc. A safer bet might be to carry around copies of expired mags Gourmet, Trump, Vibe, Nickelodeon Magazine, etc.

Levi Johnston

Last year’s Levi costume would have been an awkward suit and a hockey stick, but this year it’s much different — now that he’s an aspiring male model. Sarah Palin‘s former-almost-son-in-law is promising to reveal “huge” things about the former VP candidate, but the big news is his upcoming spread in Playgirl. For this popular costume, just wear briefs and bask in your 15 minutes of fame (briefs optional).

Next Page: Great newsy group costumes, and a twist on the Andre Agassi look

When Gourmet closed, its readers received sister publication Bon Appétit to fulfill what was left of their Gourmet subscriptions. In January, Bon Appétit will use that sub file to help boost its rate base 15 percent, to 1.5 million from 1.3 million. The increase still puts it behind its more mass competitors Cooking Light, which has a rate base of 1.75 million, and Every Day With Rachael Ray, which carries a 1.7 million circulation guarantee.

Wired editor Chris Anderson will not sit idly by while Gawker equates him with Vanity Fair‘s Graydon Carter. With budget cuts and layoffs hitting most titles in the Condé Nast universe, Gawker has reported that both Carter and Anderson — two of the publishing giant’s marquee names — were too busy helping themselves to be present in the office on the days the guillotine fell. Carter was purportedly on a private jet to Bermuda, while the Wired editor-in-chief was “[d]elivering a no doubt gainful lecture for Hewlett Packard in Silicon Valley.”

Not so fast and not true, says the bald-headed tech general Anderson, who angrily took the snark-covered bait delivered by current Valleywag editor Ryan Tate. “But at least all that time away from home and office will help bolster your independent revenue stream,” Tate sniped. “Bet your ex editors wish they had created one of those! When they weren’t picking up the slack for absent co-workers, that is.” Anderson took to his personal Twitter to respond:

Anderson has shown restraint in media drama before, passing on Malcolm Gladwell‘s takedown of his latest book Free (also covered by Tate), but couldn’t resist when the shots he claims are inaccurate came from Gawker, and specifically Tate, who worked for nearly a year at Business 2.0, a now-defunct magazine founded by Anderson. Could this be employee/employer bad blood playing itself out publicly? (UPDATE: Tate clarified to Mediaite that he arrived at the magazine after it was taken over by Time Inc., and if Anderson was still involved, he “certainly” doesn’t remember him.)

Gawker issued an update to their item, writing: “Anderson tweets he wasn’t in the office on firing day with his shell-shocked staff because he was on a ‘sales call’ for Wired at HP. More sales calls are a good thing — on different days.” But that wasn’t enough:

Then, it was Gawker’s managing editor Gabriel Snyder eager to egg on Anderson:

And Anderson shot back:

One more folks!

Certainly, a Twitter battle for the ages, not to mention Gawker’s bread and butter. Let’s hope Anderson realizes soon that no matter how inaccurate the reporting, he’s the one who looks like a punk as he continues to validate Gawker’s underdog, men-of-the-people status — something they outgrew long ago.

But as long as The Man keeps fighting back, all the while banking on speeches and avoiding layoffs, Gawker appears to be the scrappy one worth rooting for.

Vanity Fair yesterday took some of the deepest staff cuts at Condé Nast, but Editor Graydon Carter didn’t deliver the bad news himself. Although Carter was said to have been at his restaurant, The Monkey Bar last night, he was a no-show at the office during the day.

Vanity Fair’s layoffs were said to be in the double-digit range, and hit as high as senior editors and as low as fact checkers, and were deep, in part, because Carter largely ignored the edict to chop 5 percent late last year.

According to Gawker, Carter may have been on a private plane to Bermuda. Which is sort of icing on the icing. So here’s the question: Has Carter always been this checked out of his responsibilities at the magazine? He’s obviously an excellent public face for the brand, but perhaps this sort of behavior is de rigueur and we’re only just finding out about it now that the Conde facade is crumbling. Let’s hope that’s it anyway, because otherwise Carter’s absence is pretty sickening.

The business woes at Condé Nast have been well-documented and it’s not a pretty sight. With layoffs coming across the board, only the top brass and The New Yorker seem safe after decades of unmitigated reign in yesterday’s publishing model. Now, the reality has hit hard and it’s clear — Condé failed to foresee the innovations and frugal maneuvering that would become necessity amid an economic downturn and a publishing shift toward the cheaper, faster web. Well, now they’ve woken up, but digital media has proved to be a shrill alarm.

Downloadable issues of GQ will be available, beginning with the December issue, on the iPhone and iPod touch, in an effort to shore up a digital fan base before e-reader ubiquity, according to Ad Age. The $2.99 digital version of the print magazine will be available in the app store. Ad Age reports:

Users will be able to see every page as it appears in print as well as renderings of all the content tailored for display on the small screen. They will also be able to watch related videos, hear audio and visit advertisers’ sites without leaving the app.

But more importantly than the technological side is the advertising angle “because Conde wants the digitized versions of its magazines to command print ad rates, not the far lower rates seen online.” Ambitious, to be sure, but it shows Condé on the offensive — delivering a product and welcoming advertisers with open arms to an innovative service, so long as they’re prepared to pay.

But that’s not the only tech-savvy move the company is making post-McKinsey: both GQ and Details have new websites after years of sharing men.style.com — a crowded, unappealing site with minimum branding, poor readability and little room for reader interaction.

Will glossing up and plugging in be enough to save the magazine giant from becoming fully fossilized? It’s hard to say now, but at least they’re working out their creaky joints.