Adam Moss, New York’s editor in chief, acknowledges it is a bit of a moment. But last week he confidently detailed the logic as he stood in the conference room of the magazine’s lower Manhattan offices, showing off poster boards displaying alternative concepts for the cover, redesigned interior sections and a more visually driven approach to telling stories.

“We’ve talked about this for a while and you can’t help but get wistful about it,” he said as Lawrence C. Burstein, the magazine’s publisher, and Michael Silberman, general manager of the online operation, listened. “But I would be more concerned if we didn’t address how the market and people’s reading habits have changed. I would not be doing this if I didn’t believe we could make a better magazine and continue to grow what we do both in print and online.”

The punishing economics of being a stand-alone weekly can be explained in one word: Newsweek.

The cost structure at a weekly makes the drop in ads across the industry an existential threat and, as happened at Newsweek, its benefactor is no longer in the picture: Bruce Wasserstein bought New York in 2004 and died in 2009.

By all accounts his heirs are dedicated owners, but they know as well as anyone that Newsweek sold for $1 in 2010 and, after its new owner Sidney Harman died, limped along in a doomed merger with The Daily Beast until it ceased print publication last year. They and the people who work for them are trying to avoid that fate.

Journalistically, New York magazine has prospered, winning a string of big awards on the way to being named Magazine of the Year in 2013 by the American Society of Magazine Editors. But that doesn’t pay the bills, a job that increasingly falls to the website, which includes NYmag.com, Vulture.com, The Cut and Grub Street. Digital revenues have been growing at a rate of 15 percent year-over-year, and in the coming year will surpass print advertising revenues, according to Mr. Burstein. But part of the reason those lines are crossing is that the print revenues are plummeting.

New York, with a current subscriber base just above 400,000, according to the Alliance for Audited Media, got clobbered after the 2008 recession when classified ads went missing and stayed that way. So far this year, the magazine is down 9.2 percent in ad pages compared with the same period last year, which was miserable as well.