In her first couple months as chief executive of Time Inc., the country’s largest magazine publisher, Laura Lang took some time to hold town hall style meetings and field questions from many of the company’s 9,000 employees. Those questions included:

“Do you think print is dead?”

“Will magazines survive?”

“Why did you come here?”

“In the beginning the questions were crazy,” Ms. Lang said in an interview in her 34th-floor corner office at the old Time & Life building where Henry Luce housed his magazine empire. She added: “This is a building full of journalists.”

Ms. Lang is not one of them. As the former chief executive of Digitas, a unit of the Publicis Groupe, Ms. Lang helped transform a direct-mail company into a successful digital advertising firm. But not until this past January had she been fully subjected to the cutthroat world of New York media.

She came at a tumultuous time for the magazine industry and the company. Her predecessor had been fired after less than six months on the job, leaving the publisher of Time, People, InStyle and Sports Illustrated without a chief for nearly a year. In the three months that ended March 31, adjusted operating income at Time Inc. fell 38 percent to $39 million, driven mostly by a 5 percent, or $19 million, drop in advertising revenue. Overall revenue at the publishing company has declined roughly 30 percent in the last five years.

Ms. Lang, who has largely stayed out of the press since taking the job, said she did not want to come in and portend the future of the magazine business. Instead, she quietly devoted her first months on the job to talking to employees. She traveled to Boston, Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles and London to meet with them. She convened senior executives in New York to review each magazine and assess what each one needs to thrive in a digital world. She enters Time Inc. as the first chief executive from outside the industry and a female leader in a company with a reputation for being hypermasculine and marketer-averse.