On Monday afternoon, shortly after The New York Times broke the news of her appointment as the next editor-in-chief of Vanity Fair, Radhika Jones visited the editorial and sales staff of V.F. at its headquarters on the 41st floor of One World Trade Center. Jones was accompanied by Condé Nast C.E.O. Robert A. Sauerberg; Vogue editor-in-chief and Condé Nast artistic director Anna Wintour; and, of course, the man Jones succeeds, Graydon Carter, the legendary editor who has run V.F. since 1992 and announced in September that he would be stepping down at the end of the year. “I truly feel honored to be entrusted with this role,” Jones, who is 44, said to the assembled staff members, beside a wall emblazoned with the mantra “Think Like a Start-Up.”

Jones, a former high-ranking editor at Time and The Paris Review, spent the past year as the editorial director of the books department at The New York Times. She will begin her V.F. tenure on December 11. Shortly after addressing the troops, she sat down to talk with me.

Vanity Fair: You met Graydon for the first time this morning. Did he give you any good advice?

Jones: He said I’m gonna be very busy for at least a year or two, probably longer. It’s fun to meet a legend on a Monday.

Your name first surfaced in press reports a couple of weeks ago. When did your conversations with Condé Nast begin?

It was mid-September.

And at what point did it become clear to you that you wanted this job?

It was appealing to me at first mention. Vanity Fair holds this very unique place in the culture. There’s no title that compares. I’ve worked at a number of different places, and the more I thought about it, the more I thought that I could draw on different parts of my experience in a way that would be meaningful. But I always thought I was a long shot, so maybe that took a bit of the pressure off.

I heard that you submitted an ambitious memo. Can you walk me through the broad contours of your pitch to Condé Nast?

I think I should probably wait and just let it show.

On paper, your background is very literary, academic even. What are your interests in Hollywood and society, some of Vanity Fair’s strongest suits?

I’m fascinated by celebrity culture. When I started at Time in 2008, I was the arts editor, and it felt like this moment where entertainment and celebrity were really starting to change. Reality TV was gaining momentum, and the ways that people watched TV and watched movies and read about them and participated in the voyeurism of celebrity life, all of those things seemed to be changing. It’s the kind of thing you can look back on, years later, and think, wow, something fundamental shifted in the culture. I also happen to have read Tina Brown’s Vanity Fair Diaries this summer, and found it interesting to think about how she positioned high and low culture, because they’re so much more mixed now, and it’s an interesting proposition for a magazine like Vanity Fair to sort that out. It feels right to me to be thinking about these things at this moment. It feels like our culture is calling for it.

All magazine brands are facing intense pressures as they grapple with the shift away from being print-driven platforms. In terms of Vanity Fair’s platforms, where do you see the most exciting opportunity?