Here’s what qualifies as a man-bites-dog story these days: A big mainstream business publication hiring an experienced business journalist.

Weird, right? But true: Fortune magazine has hired veteran writer Dan Roth to run and revitalize the title’s Web site. He starts as managing editor next week.

This qualifies as news because:

• Big magazines–and business titles like Fortune in particular–have been shedding jobs, not creating them. Roth, for instance,was a victim of layoffs at Condé Nast’s Wired magazine last fall–just after he published this excellent and sobering analysis of Demand Media, in which he describes what its ascent says about the future of “content creation.”
• Fortune hasn’t done much with its site for some time. So rehiring Roth, a well-regarded writer and editor at the magazine from 1998 to 2006, signals that it has ambitions to do…something with it.

For the past several years, Time Warner’s (TWX) Time Inc. has allowed Fortune to more or less languish on the Web, while letting its CNNMoney.com site do the digital heavy lifting for all things business, which it does pretty well, attracting more than 13 million unique monthly visitors, per comScore (SCOR).

Fortune.com, meanwhile is minimally staffed and serves primarily as a repository for the magazine’s print stories, the occasional special package and a steady stream of updates on Apple (AAPL) from the prolific Philip Elmer-DeWitt. Put it this way: Roth won’t be displacing anyone by taking the top editorial job at the site, because the site hasn’t had a full-time edit person running it for a couple of years.

But now, though Roth won’t say so out loud, it appears that the Time Inc. braintrust has decided to reinvest in Fortune.com and will give him the ability to make more hires. Here’s his more modest description of his job description:

I think Fortune has the chance to take what it does best–covering the most important companies and business people–and reinterpret that for the Web. The goal is to take the intelligence found in the magazine’s long-form features and make that voice and worldview work in a shorter form and at a faster pace.

Disclosure: I worked with Dan for a few months way back in the late 1990s, and he interviewed me when he wrote about my last employer a couple years ago. It’s a good read.

Or more accurately, it’s going to start tinkering with the notion.

Time Inc. EVP John Squires, who floated the idea with reporters yesterday, teased it out a bit for Silicon Alley Insider: “Certain content area of our sites will try some pay tests, just to see what will drive consumers to get out their wallets or subscribe to one of our magazines.”

PaidContent’s Staci Kramer got a Time Inc. official to provide an equally vague take: “There is nothing specific to point to now but you can expect some experiments within six to eight months. We’re also looking closely at devices and applications and pricing and business models associated with those.”

The upshot: You’re going to see more and more publishers at least fiddle with the notion of getting readers to pay for something online. The New York Times (NYT), for instance, has been publicly musing about this for some time now.

And bear in mind that lots of publishers never stopped trying to get consumers to pay up. Disney’s ESPN.com (DIS) for instance, has sold an “Insiders” premium subscription alongside its free stuff for many years.

And sports may be a natural place for Time Inc. to try an upsell. Yahoo Sports, which charges a premium for its fantasy sports offering, has seen annual revenue increases of more than 20% for years — including this year — according to Jim Pitaro, who runs Yahoo’s (YHOO) sports and entertainment group.

Meanwhile, here’s a way to get a sense of what Time Inc. really wanted to talk about yesterday — the decks they used in their presentations. In order, the slides are from Squires; Time.com managing editor Josh Tryangiel; CNNMoney.com SVP Jonathan Shar; EW.com managing editor Cyndi Stivers;  and SI Digital VP Ken Fuchs.

TIME_DigitalShowcase_031809 – Get more Business Documents

CNNMoney_DigitalShowcase_031809 – Get more Business Documents

Squires_DigitalShowcase_031809 – Get more Business Documents

CNNMoney_DigitalShowcase_031809 – Get more Business Documents

EW_DigitalShowcase_031809 – Get more Business Documents

SIGOLF_DigitalShowcase_031809 – Get more Business Documents

That will change beginning next week, says Time Inc. spokeswoman Dawn Bridges. She says CEO Ann Moore (right) and her lieutenants will unveil the “size, staffing and structure of each of the business units” beginning “early next week.”

Unfortunately, that still doesn’t mean that Time Inc. workers will all learn their fate at the same time. A person familiar with the plans tells me the re-org could take a couple weeks to roll out.

Also fuzzy: The number of people who are going to get cut. The 600 number The New York Times reported last month is a ballpark estimate, I’m told. Time is telling individual unit managers to reduce overall payroll, but they’ll have autonomy to make the cuts themselves.

A reasonable but completely unverified hunch: People who work at SI.com, People.com and CNNMoney.com may be in better shape than their colleagues. Those three sites were singled out as top performers during Time Warner’s earnings release this morning, in which the company said the magazine publisher’s overall revenues had dropped seven percent and that ad sales had declined eight percent in the last quarter.

Know more? Let me know: peter@allthingsd.com.

This isn’t a total shock. The previous quarter, AOL had only been able to manage two percent advertising growth, and the company had already signaled since then that both its display ad business and its ad network were struggling. But given that these results cover the three-month period that ended Sept. 30, which only included a couple weeks of flat-out economic collapse, there will be worse news in store for the last quarter of the year.

Total revenues at the unit, owned by Time Warner (TWX), dropped 17 percent, to $1 billion. The bulk of that is attributable to its declining (down 26 percent) subscription business, so that number is less relevant–except to whoever may be in the market for one or both parts of the unit, like Yahoo (YHOO). Things would have been even worse, by the way, if AOL’s paid-search business hadn’t ticked up.

Overall results at Time Warner were flat for the year, with revenues of $11.7 billion and earnings of 30 cents per share. CEO Jeff Bewkes also announced that 2008 earnings would be lower than previously forecast due to restructuring charges, but that cash flow would actually be higher than the company had predicted.

Revenues at its to-be-shrunk Time Inc. publishing unit dropped seven percent, pushed down by an eight percent drop in ad revenue. The good news is that online revenues of $13 million, driven primarily by SI.com, People.com and CNNMoney.com, helped cushion some of the blow. The bad news is that those numbers are down from $19 million in the previous quarter.

Other results:

• Cable: Revenues up eight percent; adjusted operating income up nine percent.
• Movies: Revenues nine percent (“The Dark Knight” did great, but not as well as “Harry Potter,” “Rush Hour 3″ and “Hairspray” last year).
• Cable TV networks: Revenues up seven percent. Both subscription fees and ad revenues were up.

One of note for MediaMemo readers: The departure of Ned Desmond, a longtime Time Inc. vet who was most recent title was President of Time Inc. Interactive. Ned’s bio is here; nice-to-know-you memo from Ann Moore follows:

To:        Time Inc. Employees

A.M.                 J.S.