It is easy to blame the internet, but to Mr. Fielden, that is a tired excuse.

“There are a lot of false narratives out there,” he said. “You tell me about the last time you had an amazing experience on a website that you wanted to print and hang on your wall? If that’s the Holy Grail, that’s something we’ve done with newspapers and magazines for our entire existence, and that’s where this thing has to hit, because the human race is not getting stupider.”

Even so, Esquire is pouring new resources into the web. This past December, Esquire’s 48-hour pop-up channel, “The Esquire Guide to Grooming” on Snapchat’s Discover platform, reached more than three million unique viewers. Hearst recently hired Steve Kandell, the former executive editor for features at BuzzFeed, to direct Esquire.com, a site that has received a traffic boost of 20 percent in the past six months.

The site managed to insert itself into the cultural conversation at numerous points during the recent election cycle, such as with an online-only reboot of the seminal ’80s satirical magazine Spy, or Peter J. Boyer’s bite-size scoop that Donald J. Trump was considering evicting the press corps from the White House, which became the talk of the Sunday-morning political shows.

This is not to say that an Esquire editor who reads the literary critic Christopher Ricks for fun in airports has any plans to scuttle Esquire’s prized long-form literary tradition to fit Twitter attention spans. Vicky Ward’s feature article in August, “Jared Kushner’s Second Act,” a prescient look at the political rise of Mr. Trump’s 36-year-old son-in-law, was just one of the 6,000-word-plus features under Mr. Fielden to create buzz within the industry.

“Bad short pieces read long, and good long pieces read short,” Mr. Fielden said. “I don’t think shrinking is necessarily bad. I’m a great fan of the haiku.”

If Mr. Fielden’s only challenge were competing with the internet, that would at least be a familiar problem. More confounding is the rapidly changing cultural landscape.