Condé Nast Adapts to New Forces, Leaving Some Employees Unsettled

A few years ago, Anna Wintour, David Remnick and Graydon Carter went to see S. I. Newhouse Jr., the man who turned Condé Nast into a gilded publishing empire and who handpicked them to lead its flagship magazines.

The economy had crashed. The publishing industry was fighting a financial crisis that amounted to an existential threat. Mr. Newhouse, in his 80s, was approaching the end of his career. They were concerned, they told him at his apartment, decorated with selections from a postwar American art collection, about Condé Nast’s future. To succeed, they said, Condé Nast needed strong creative leadership across its portfolio of disparate magazines, the kind of leadership that Mr. Newhouse himself and his longtime artistic director Alexander Liberman had provided for decades.

It was Ms. Wintour herself, the longtime editor of Vogue and one of the most powerful figures in fashion and publishing, who was eventually appointed as Mr. Liberman’s heir — artistic director of Condé Nast, overseeing its portfolio. She and Bob Sauerberg, Condé Nast’s chief executive, have introduced a rash of changes, both cultural and structural, that have left some in the company reeling.

“Those who want things always to stay the same are not living in the real world,” Ms. Wintour said in a recent interview at her office overlooking the Hudson River at Condé Nast’s new headquarters, One World Trade Center. “It’s like perfection. Doesn’t exist.”

New editors have been appointed at Allure, Condé Nast Traveler, Architectural Digest and Self. And in recent months, a round of layoffs struck GQ, Teen Vogue, Glamour, Self and Allure. Details, the men’s lifestyle magazine, was shuttered entirely after 33 years.

In a separate interview, Mr. Sauerberg confirmed that Condé Nast took in over $1 billion in revenue in 2015. The company said that while its print business, spread across nearly 20 magazines, remained profitable, revenue there had been flat since 2012. Its digital business is up nearly 70 percent over the same period but that component, as with virtually every other legacy media company, represents a much smaller percentage of overall revenue, which has declined in recent years.

Mr. Sauerberg’s plan focuses on maintaining print share, and increasing digital revenues through a focus on video and selling some publications to advertisers as a bundle, for example, and by increasing web traffic. Shortfalls in the meantime mean cutting costs, as Condé Nast is required by its parent company, Advance Publications, to show a profit.

In interviews, nearly a dozen current and former employees, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive internal matters, lamented a focus on the bottom line and a relentless pursuit of web traffic. Many acknowledged that the era of lavish spending at Condé Nast, with clothing allowances and town cars idling outside the headquarters, waiting to whisk employees to appointments, was not sustainable. But they suggested that financial survival and journalistic swagger — the kind that made Condé Nast an emblem of the golden age of publishing — need not be mutually exclusive.

Mr. Sauerberg defended the recent upheaval as vital restructuring. His aim, he says, is to ensure that his company continues to influence the world. “I am the top of the list,” he said. “I am incredibly competitive. I want to win. I want to be the best.”

Cathy Horyn, a critic at large for New York magazine and a former fashion critic for The New York Times, says that Condé Nast is “a delicate organism, and historically that company has proven that it gets along better with an artistic director.” Ms. Wintour, she says, “brings the most institutional knowledge, but the big question is that the outside world has changed so much and can Anna play catch-up?”

The decisions made in recent months have been Mr. Sauerberg’s. But for those who work at Condé Nast, or follow the company, it is Ms. Wintour, or at least the myth that surrounds her, that looms behind every change.

In addition to editing Vogue, she oversees magazines as varied as Brides and Golf Digest (Mr. Remnick, at The New Yorker, and Mr. Carter, at Vanity Fair, are largely left to their own devices). She has also grown increasingly influential in Democratic politics. And she has been involved with the recently named Anna Wintour Costume Center at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the annual Costume Institute Benefit at the Met. It is easy to forget that she has been making magazines for decades.

Half a dozen current and former Condé Nast employees described working with Ms. Wintour as a privilege in some ways — she has access to improved budgets, the best photographers, and celebrities and socialites to fill pages — and a fraught experience in others. She gravitates toward her own distinctive visual style and can be dismissive when displeased, some staff members said.

When asked about those accounts, Ms. Wintour stared stonily and asked whether The New York Times was a tabloid newspaper. “Come on,” she said. “I am decisive, you know. I don’t believe in wasting anybody’s time. I like to be honest. I like to be clear. In my own personal career, I have felt almost the most difficult thing to deal with is someone who doesn’t tell you what they are thinking.”

She agreed, when asked, that there was an element of sexism in the way she is viewed. “But I decided long ago that I can’t let any of that bother me,” she said. “If my style is too direct for some, maybe they should toughen up a bit.”

She strongly disagreed that the magazines she most closely oversees have begun to resemble Vogue, saying each of them has “a very original voice.”

In some ways, Ms. Wintour and Mr. Sauerberg make an unlikely pair. He is quiet and studied, and speaks with pride about the technical aspects of the business that he has worked on for some years, including a new content management system, growth on the digital side of the business and improved offerings for advertisers.

He is an avid golfer who studied finance at the University of Arkansas. At Condé Nast, he oversaw consumer marketing then served as president before formally taking over as chief executive this month.

He does not believe in motivating his staff, he said. “I believe in hiring motivated people and giving them the rein and the authority to do great work.”

When asked about a view among some of his staff that he is more of a business figure than a creative leader, he conceded that his career had drawn him in that direction, but that he was looking forward to showing more. “You can make the statement that the guy came up this way,” Mr. Sauerberg said, referring to his background, “and it is my job to show them that it’s not this way.”

In recent emails to the staff, he drew attention to companywide internal awards as well as National Magazine Award nominations, and pointed to a social media advertising campaign based on a series of videos Condé Nast had put together about its creativity.

Mr. Sauerberg, Ms. Wintour said, was not the same as Mr. Newhouse. But she says he is passionate about the magazines, and has his own skills: “Everybody brings something different to a position. And it’s not cookie-cutter. Nobody is ever the same.”

She spoke warmly of Mr. Newhouse and Mr. Liberman, who she said had always encouraged her to take risks. But when asked whether running a publishing company at a time of web-traffic targets and downsizing was less fun than in the prior era, she reacted strongly.

“I don’t like that word ‘fun’ because it sounds light,” she said. “It’s intriguing. It’s intellectually stimulating. It’s different. Why do people want to get stuck in the past?”

“If we sit back with our quills and the visors on and, you know, the old kind of printing presses that I used to see with my dad,” she said, referring to her father, Charles, who edited The London Evening Standard, “what is the point of thinking that way? Come on.”