Rumors of widespread staff reductions at the publishing conglomerate have been floating around in media circles for several days, with some estimates of the cuts running as high as 700 people. According to a number of reports, the layoffs will hit virtually every aspect of the company, including most of its 21 magazine titles such as People, Fortune and Sports Illustrated.

At the eponymous magazine that started the empire, Time editor Rick Stengel said he was looking for half a dozen staffers to take a voluntary buyout, and if that number isn’t reached by Feb. 13, there will be mandatory layoffs. People magazine, one of the company’s top titles in terms of subscribers, said that it was looking for nine people to take voluntary buyouts — three writers and six reporters or researchers — or there will be layoffs.

Lang says Time needs to be more nimble

The bleeding is apparently so bad at the media giant that there was even a report from Reuters that Time may sell its iconic headquarters in New York City. Lang said in her memo that the cuts were required in order to transform Time into a more nimble, multi-platform company:

“With the significant and ongoing changes in our industry, we must continue to transform our company into one that is leaner, more nimble and more innately multi-platform. These reductions are part of this important transformation process.”

The broader story at Time is the same as it is at newspapers like the New York Times and Washington Post: print advertising revenue, which has been the company’s bread-and-butter for decades, is in free fall — and digital advertising and online revenue have not even come close to making up the difference. In the nine months ended in September, revenues at Time fell by 6 percent, and operating profit dropped a whopping 38 percent.

Since Lang arrived as CEO a year ago, the former ad agency executive has made a number of moves to try and boost Time’s digital revenues, including a deal with Apple to sell subscriptions through the company’s iOS Newsstand app. But the benefits of such arrangements — whatever they may be — don’t seem to be enough to stem the ongoing damage.

When his main competitor Newsweek announced that it was shutting down its print edition after a merger with Tina Brown’s Daily Beast online venture, Stengel said that Time magazine had “done very well and we’ll continue to do well.” But given what we’ve seen at other media entities, these cuts are unlikely to be the end of the pain for Time Inc.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock / Aperture 51

Users opening the new m.people.com will see a change in content as well as design — instead of a curated news and photo feed created for snacking, the new mobile People offers the complete desktop content. For instance, mobile users will be able to read People.com’s celebrity blogs. And they will see a new ad format for Time Inc., a “snap banner” that sits at the bottom of the page but scrolls down the screen with the user and “snaps” into place when they stop.

The shift in content strategy comes from user behavior as more sophisticated devices emerged, Liz White, general manager of People Digital and Tony Brancato, senior product director, told paidContent in an interview as the site was relaunching. “Call what we had before version 1.5,” said White. “The initial version was us operating on the assumption that people were coming to the mobile phone to snack.” But when 25 percent of mobile users spend 5 minutes or more on the site, they’re coming for more than a quick snack. They also may be visiting from a variety of screens throughout the day.

White says People‘s mobile site has more than 4.5 million monthly uniques, according to Nielsen Mobile, and White says mobile accounts for about 10 percent of all People.com pageviews. People.com claims 13 million unique users a month and more than 1 billion pageviews. The majority come from iOS but Android is gaining. Kindle Fire is “a blip but it we see it growing; market share is picking up,” said Brancato. They’re also keeping an eye on Google’s Nexus 7.

The costs of a redesign make the switch to responsive a little more expensive on the front end, Brancato said, but People will save probably five times the cost in the long run in terms of upkeep and the editors’ ability to manage the site. For White, “The driving force is the unity of the user experience. As responsive design takes hold consumer benefits are huge, as are the brand benefits from making sure the consumer experience is viable on all devices.” Responsive design means the site should be able to adapt to new devices as they emerge.

The new m.people.com is also being edited specifically for mobile with “dayparting” in mind — changing the kinds of content that are highlighted to match or encourage certain kinds of user behavior at different times of day. For instance, Monday morning visitors will be offered a “what you missed” wrap up for the weekend, while evening users will get companion content for primetime shows like The Bacholorette finale. “We know people have more time to linger during lunch, after dinner,” said White. The slide below shows how people are using m.people.com throughout the day.

People has hired an editor for mobile — a first for the magazine and another first for Time Inc., recognition that offering the same content across platform doesn’t equal shoveling the same content. “Like most sites when we first launched, it was basically a feed taken from the desktop site built of a flawed assumption that people want the same kind of content,” White aid. That may sound a little contradictory given that part of this redesign is about making desktop content available. The difference is programming with mobile in mind and a mix of mobile-exclusive content.

White sees it as a way to make use of “found” time — the time opened up by a device that’s in reach and in use most of the day. “The mantra here was not just programming for the device but programming for the moment,” she added, whether it’s a quick check between meetings or during TV.

The redesign also includes some enhanced ways of sharing content. In addition to the now-routine Twitter and Facebook sharing, m.people.com users can share via SMS text message if they want to send a link to a sister or friend. White was shocked to realize how few sites offer that option.

Imagine how many texts might been sent the day People.com broke the news that Katie Holmes wanted a divorce from Tom Cruise.

People already has a mobile sales director embedded with the sales team. Motorola is the first sponsor using the new “Snap Banner”. While White didn’t provide actual costs of advertising on the mobile site, she said the new ad unit has a premium of 25-to-30 percent over People‘s usual mobile ads.

“The other major initiative as part of this is to build a very robust advertising experience,” White said. In addition to selling advertising, the site also is a marketing tool for subscriptions so users will see “touts” offering subscriptions.

People also will offer standard units and full-page interstitials within the context of how various ads come across on different devices. “When you have a screen size of three inches, you have to be really mindful of the difference,” she said; that does away with “the idea that we can just take the standrad banner and slap it on the page.”

The snap banner is their way of pushing the envelope by claiming attention for a advertiser on a long-scrolling page.

Next Issue’s expansion to iPad is its first real chance at widespread adoption. The company started up back in 2009, when Condé Nast, Hearst, Meredith, News Corp and Time Inc. teamed up to create a cross-platform digital newsstand — but there were no visible results until the launch of a digital storefront “preview” on the Samsung Galaxy tablet in May 2011. The launch for Android 3.0 (Honeycomb) and above in April 2012 was a small step forward, but few people owned the right tablet.

With Next Issue’s launch on iPad, there’s a better opportunity to see whether readers are interested in all-you-can-read tablet magazines for a flat monthly fee. Thirty-nine popular titles are available now (full list below), with more expected later this year. Subscribers can choose an “unlimited basic” subscription for $9.99 per month, which gives them access to all monthly and biweekly titles, or an “unlimited premium” subscription for $14.99 per month, which adds weeklies like Time and the New Yorker to the mix. They can also purchase individual magazine subscriptions, ranging in price from $1.99 to $5.99 per month, and individual magazine issues, ranging in price from $2.49 to $5.99 per issue. There are free 30-day trials for both unlimited basic and premium subscriptions.

If a user already subscribes to a certain title, he or she can read that digital edition from within the app for free “or a nominal cost,” depending on whether the publisher bundles print and digital editions (as Time Inc., Condé Nast and Meredith do) or charges separately for digital editions (as Hearst does).

“GQ” magazine in carousel view

Is it a good deal?

Next Issue’s app looks great on both Android and iPad, and its availability on iPad opens it up to many more magazine lovers. But will they find unlimited subscriptions worth the fee? It probably depends on how much they’re paying for magazine subscriptions now, whether they’re willing to shift the money they’re paying from print to digital, how much they value a print subscription, how much they want to read popular magazines in general versus specific titles, and whether Next Issue has the titles they want. (As my colleague Mathew Ingram notes, this is also not the platform for people who prefer a Flipboard-style, social-based method of reading content.)

A personal example: My household subscribes to the print versions of New Yorker, Bon Appetit, Real Simple, Martha Stewart Living and the Economist. The total annual cost we pay for those magazines (using the prices listed on the magazine website, and assuming no discounts for multi-year subscriptions or other special offers) is $256.98, or about $21 a month. So an “unlimited premium” Next Issue Media subscription should be a bargain for us at $14.99 a month — except it doesn’t include print issues and two of the magazines we subscribe to, Martha Stewart Living and the Economist, aren’t available, at least for now.

As Next Issue adds more magazines, though — CEO Morgan Guenther tells me that the company plans to double the number of titles it offers this year — it becomes a better deal, and dropping print subscriptions becomes more enticing. In 2013, Next Issue will add its first “outside publisher” titles — i.e., magazines not published by the five companies already participating in the JV — in “key segments.” (That could include magazines like The Economist and Consumer Reports.) The company also plans to expand to some international markets, add search and social features, add some advertising and expand to newspapers (at which point titles from News Corp, the fifth partner in the JV, will become available).

The list of magazines available now, by publisher

*=weekly magazine only included in premium subscription package

Condé Nast

• Allure
• Bon Appétit
• Brides
• Condé Nast Traveler
• Glamour
• Golf Digest
• GQ
• The New Yorker*
• Self
• Vanity Fair
• Vogue
• Wired

Hearst

• Car and Driver
• Elle
• Esquire
• Popular Mechanics

Meredith

• Better Homes and Gardens
• Fitness
• Parents

Time

• All You
• Coastal Living
• Cooking Light
• Entertainment Weekly
• Essence
• Fortune
• Golf
• Health
• InStyle
• Money
• People*
• People en Español
• People StyleWatch
• Real Simple
• Southern Living
• Sports Illustrated*
• Sports Illustrated Kids
• Sunset
• This Old House
• Time*

The promotion will run through March 9. The NYT’s Media Decoder, which announced the news ahead of the official Barnes & Noble (NYSE: BKS) announcements (here and here), reports:

The Nook edition of People is $9.99 a month; with a one-year subscription, customers will receive a Nook Tablet, a color device with a 7-inch display, for $199, a discount from its regular price of $249. Customers who buy a one-year subscription for the Nook edition of The New York Times for $19.99 a month, which includes access to NYTimes.com (NYSE: NYT), will receive a black-and-white Nook Simple Touch free or a Nook Color for $99.

The Nook Tablet is discounted by only $50, but that brings it down to the price of the Kindle Fire. The Nook Color is heavily discounted, by $100. The Nook Simple Touch is normally $99. The total cost of a one-year People subscription on Nook is $119.88, and the total cost of a one-year NYT subscription on Nook is $239.88.

Barnes & Noble announced last week that it may spin off its Nook business, though CEO William Lynch said in a CNBC (NSDQ: CMCSA) interview that B&N stores and Nook would “continue to have a very symbiotic relationship.” This promotion is intended to showcase Nook Newsstand, which Barnes & Noble sees as one of the fastest growing parts of the Nook business.

More significantly, the promotion opens the door for other retailers–ahem, Amazon–to start offering free or discounted e-readers or tablets with content subscriptions. Nothing was preventing Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN) from doing that before, of course, but I would not be surprised to see it respond now with an offer of its own for Kindle Fire Newsstand subscribers.

It is our understanding that Time Inc. (NYSE: TWX) and Barnes & Noble are sharing the cost of the discounted Nook Tablet that comes with the Nook People subscription. The New York Times says it is “not divulging terms of our agreement with Barnes and Noble.”

– Games People.com plays: One of the new initiatives that People.com unveiled this past week is its new Games channel. Launching with six games, such as Celebrity Trivia, Hollywood Hangman, Love Connection and other fun revolving around entertainment, the channel is part of what Golin and Hauser say is a key part of the site’s growth strategy. Hauser: “We