“She has vision and energy and a very active mind,” Mr. Newhouse added, “and I think that’s what Vanity Fair needs.”

Ms. Jones was the only candidate Mr. Newhouse met.

A product of Ridgefield, Conn., by way of New York and Cincinnati, Ms. Jones graduated from Harvard College and received a doctoral degree in English and comparative literature from Columbia University. She has lived in Taipei and Moscow, where she got her start in journalism as the arts editor at The Moscow Times, an English-language newspaper. (Her Russian, she said, is rusty.)

Many editors in her position would proclaim their love of magazines, particularly the one they are about to sit atop, but Ms. Jones was characteristically candid.

“It’s hard for me to exactly figure out when I became obsessed with magazines,” she said.

Did she read Vanity Fair growing up?

“On and off,” she said.

She declined to describe her plans for Vanity Fair. “I need to get oriented first — there’s a lot to take in,” she said. She also demurred when asked about any writers she was considering. “I’m just really interested in discovery,” she said.

Ms. Jones, who joined The Times last November, is not the first person to make the move from Times books coverage to the top editorial position at Vanity Fair. In 1981, as Condé Nast announced its plan to revive the Jazz Age title, it appointed Richard Locke, an editor at The New York Times Book Review, to run it. “We take risks,” Alexander Liberman, then Condé Nast’s editorial director, said when asked about the selection.

Mr. Locke was replaced by a Condé Nast veteran, Leo Lerman, four issues into his run.

Those who know Ms. Jones believe she will thrive, citing her academic background as well as the breadth of her interests. Before she joined The Times, she was a deputy managing editor at Time magazine, where she transformed the Time 100 franchise into an eclectic mix of celebrities and unheralded visionaries. After the issue’s corresponding annual gala, she would host an all-night karaoke party at a Midtown dive. At The Paris Review, the literary quarterly able to make a young writer’s career, she served as managing editor.