Still, the subscriptions to all the company’s magazines, other than The New Yorker, remain cheap, as they were when the goal was simply to pump up circulation numbers for advertisers. And nobody knows what will happen if they are forced to raise prices to compensate for lost ad revenue.

But the coronavirus crisis is clearly reordering the priorities at what the Condé chairman, Jonathan Newhouse, once referred to as “the Vogue Company.” Now its fortunes depend on whether The New Yorker — now the strongest business in the company — and Wired can keep pace with the red-hot Atlantic, and on Bon Appétit feeding and entertaining the homebound masses. Nobody is putting on a Givenchy cape anytime soon.

Mr. Lynch, the former chief of Pandora, comes from the alternate world of the tech industry. He talks passionately about corporate strategy and plays in a classic rock cover band called the Merger. He arrived in 2019 at a business still shaped by the legacy of the Newhouse family, which had turned a workaday newspaper fortune into a glamorous and glossy magazine publishing house. The company drifted through the internet age until the death of the magnate S.I. Newhouse in 2017, the same year, Edmund Lee and Sapna Maheshwari reported in The New York Times, that Condé had lost $120 million.

Mr. Lynch’s hiring signaled Condé’s shift away from family passion project to a more professional era, suggesting to many observers that they will eventually sell the media company — though the family staunchly denies that. While the Newhouses still dominate the board of its parent company, Advance, they added outside directors for the first time last summer. Their billions no longer depend on Condé Nast — they have big stakes in the cable television businesses — and they have diversified further, even spending $730 million to buy the endurance sports company Ironman Group as the coronavirus shut down its events.

Mr. Lynch said today’s Condé Nast differed greatly from its outdated image.

“I think most people think about Condé Nast in the context of the old Condé Nast. I mean, it’s a big magazine business, a lot of drama, a lot of excess,” he said. “That’s just not the company today.”

In reality, Mr. Lynch is scrambling to create a business model that does not yet exist, with no guarantee that there’s any way to stop the bleeding. Condé operates huge YouTube channels and considers itself the platform’s “largest premium publisher” — but the reason there aren’t many others is because those videos cost a lot to make, and often don’t earn it back. GQ China operates the biggest commercial channel on the social platform WeChat, publishing viral comics at a higher margin — but at a different kind of cost: British GQ pulled Xi Jinping off its “worst dressed” list last year for fear of giving offense.

And it is contending with broader social and generational shifts that make its culture of casual drama and cruelty seem a poor fit for the values of its unionizing, millennial work force. Ms. Wintour’s former editor-at-large André Leon Talley drew headlines last week for writing in his new memoir that she left him with “vast emotional and psychic scars,” prompting another designer to call her “santanic” in an Instagram screed. (Joseph Libonati, a Condé spokesman, said “Anna wishes Andre only the best.”)