According to sources with knowledge of the events, Self editor Lucy Danzinger and her magazine's consumer marketing staff ultimately grew frustrated enough to bring in their own outside consultant to build the first online version of what became the "Self Challenge." The Challenge not only drew in a tremendous audience of current magazine readers but also generated more than 100,000 new subscriptions for the magazine last year.

It was an “Aha!” moment, one that led the company’s editorial director, Tom Wallace, to tell The New York Times last month that ''what happened at Self is very important for Condé Nast,'' important enough that every magazine in the company should have a dedicated Web editor along with a CondéNet administered site.

There’s a relative hiring boom underway in the online divisions of blue-chips while companies are clamping down on headcount at their magazine or broadcast properties.

It’s taken nearly ten years, but the Web is finally delivering results that not only print editors but also business executives can understand. While Web ad sales are booming and expected to overtake magazines this year according to Merrill Lynch and other analysts, magazines are struggling. At CondéNet’s sites ad revenue rose 65 percent in 2005. By contrast, the only Conde Nast magazines to post even a double digit gain in advertising pages last year were the relatively young launches Teen Vogue and Cargo — and the latter was shut down just a few weeks ago.

The trend has affected thinking throughout the media world, which is again abuzz with talk of the Web. The difference is that this time the profits are for real — and the print and broadcast sides that control the purse strings are taking notice. Web-savvy staffers are once again looking like winners after a few years spent toiling in the boiler rooms of media conglomerates which had hoped to forget they’d ever existed. There’s a relative hiring boom underway in the online divisions of blue-chips like CBS News, Hearst, Hachette Filipacchi and even Condé Nast during a period when those companies and their peers are clamping down on headcount at their magazines or broadcast properties.

There's also a return to the tricky corporate politics of the late 1990s, when the dot. commers wanted IPOs and the Old Guard wanted only to deliver a comeuppance. This time around, through, the Old Guard seems to know enough about what's going on in the digital realm to take control.

When Hachette Filipacchi Media, home to such powerhouse titles as Elle, Premiere and Car and Driver announced this Spring that it was shuttering ElleGirl, it was quick to note that it was, in fact, only closing the print version, and instead moving its resources online. That didn't save the jobs of most of the magazine's editors. And while Web editor Anne Sachs will be hiring six new people to her team, they'll all be at about the editorial assistant level. It's also true that Sachs belongs to Alloy, the online media, marketing and e-tailing firm that will shoulder the burden of producing ElleGirl.

Still, Hachette is paying new attention, and is showing a new interest in the Web. “We’ve created an investment and business plan for ElleGirl,” says Marta Wöhrle, Hachette’s director of digital media, “and we will be renegotiating our contract with Alloy. [Sachs] will stay on as an Alloy employee, but she’ll still be working in this building, and there will be a reporting line into me.” Sachs has been working in ElleGirl’s offices all along and attending its editorial meetings.

Wöhrle also stresses that she and Hachette CEO Jack Kliger aren’t about to virtualize and outsource the company’s other magazines anytime soon, despite the recent revelation that Kliger has been under pressure to slash the corporate payroll by five percent. In fact, Wöhrle, has more than doubled the headcount of her unit from 30 to 64 employees, a figure that includes editors, producers, and technical staff, plus each of the magazine’s Web editors, who, like Sachs, at least nominally report to her. Wöhrle also knows that Hachette’s editors want more, not less involvement in their respective sites now that Web-generated subscriptions and online revenues are emerging as the industry’s great hope.

“I keep telling my boss,” she laughs, “that I’ll be redundant in two years.”

New Attention, Confused Structures

CondéNet celebrated the 10th anniversary of its eldest brand, Epicurious, last year. Not that anyone noticed. And even during the Bubble-Bust epoch of 2001-2003, the powers-that-be never swooped down to shutter, or even really tinker much, with any of its sites. While Silicon Alley crashed, burned, and smoldered around them, they just did their thing. Vanity Fair and The New Yorker's Web sites went through redesigns, and tried different business models. Vogue, Men's Vogue, and a Vogue shopping site all launched, went through their own redesigns, and even won the prestigious National Magazine Award for overall Internet excellence in the process. They could, because no one else in the facsimile of Louis XIV’s court that passes for the org chart at Condé could make heads or tails of what they were doing.

CondéNet president Sarah Chubb disagrees with some details of the retelling of Self's online ascension but does confirm that an outside consultant “was the engine” behind its site. She also awards her own division its share of credit in Self’s success. The Web editors, she says, “understand what tools there are in the toolkit, but ultimately they’re immersed in the cultures of their magazines,” unlike her own staff, which just moved out of Condé’s headquarters at 4 Times Square (again).

“[House & Garden editor-in-chief] Dominque Browning has been online exactly twice, once to see her own site, and once to see what [archrival] Paige Rense was doing.”

Indeed, the magazine culture doesn't always jibe with what's needed on the Web, which can lead to comically convoluted communications that leave everyone on the Web side scratching their heads. “They don’t know what they want, but they know they want a hired gun to work with them,” says one source who has been briefed on the company’s evolving Web strategy. “CondéNet hasn’t reached out to them because the editors can’t tell them what it is they’re looking for. The editors need a third party, a ‘people person’ to reach out to CondéNet and be the liaison between the two sides,” i.e. a corporate diplomat trying to fill a void that’s been a decade in the making.

In principle, this vision seems sensible, but it quickly turns comical when one tries to picture what a Web-savvy member of Architectural Digest or House & Garden’s staff would look like. “[House & Garden editor-in-chief] Dominque Browning has been online exactly twice,” says the source who has been briefed. “Once to see her own site, and once to see what Paige Rense was doing,” Rense being her archrival at Arch Digest. (Chubb declined comment on whether either of the aforementioned magazines had hired Web editors yet.)

And what if someone with Browning’s passing familiarity with the Web declares himself the boss the moment things begin looking up again? That’s essentially what happened in 2004-2005 at ABCNews.com, accordingly to the victims of a diaspora that saw a generation of savvy producers leave once executives on the television side thought they should be running things. Former staff still talk about a presentation in the executive suites during which a chart was shown with a downward sloping line representing on air TV viewership contrasted with a sharply upward sloping line that indicated the projected rise in use of high-speed Internet connections at home. (ABCNews did not respond to a request for comment.) The Web team began to really lose control of operations during the election season of 2004, when senior online executives presented a plan for wall-to-wall coverage of the conventions on ABCNews Live, a 24-7 digital channel, rather than on-air.

"It really wasn't until it filtered back to [then-anchor] Peter [Jennings], who decided he wanted to do it, did the network come around to the idea,” said one ex-staffer. “And that's when they began bigfooting us. We were really excited, and we wanted to play a key role in it, but there was no desire or even willingness to work with us in the minds of folks on the TV side. They came in and told us how it should be done. Their attitude was: This is television. We know how to do television on the Web."

The resulting power struggle lasted for most of 2005, with the TV executives employing an effective trench war strategy that involved squeezing the budgets of their online colleagues until yet another producer reached the end of his or her rope and quit (often with no job lined up), which offered yet another opportunity to appoint a TV loyalist for the job and thus further consolidate their power. Whether that person was actually qualified to do the job seemingly had little to do with it.

"Some of the people in significant positions of authority there do not seem to understand the Internet or the people who use it to get their news,” says the ex-staffer. “I suspect a few of them hadn't paid much attention to the Web until they were put in charge of managing a part of it."

In his book “Burn Rate,” Michael Wolff lamented that the continually evolving technical sophistication of the Web eliminated the possibility of ever acquiring expertise. However much one learned about the business models of 1995 or 1996, they were no doubt obsolete by 1998, as were any technical innovations from the same time frame.

In 2006, we appear to have mastered both the technology and content to the point where we’re getting cocky again (even Wolff) but we have yet to discover an organizational model that doesn’t pit, on at least a cultural level, the corporate establishment versus those busy acquiring the new expertise. Unlike last time, when they could be safely mocked for just not getting it, this time the establishment thinks online may actually succeed, and so they're doing whatever they can to claim a piece of it. The problem is that a little bit of knowledge may prove to be a dangerous thing.