The company plans on announcing the details of the reorg tomorrow, but here’s the most important one: The reshuffling won’t result in any layoffs, a person familiar with the situation tells me.

That’s nice for Condé’s employees, who already went through cuts last fall. But it’s also puzzling: If merging all of Condé’s Web operations into one group doesn’t eliminate a single redundancy, then what does it do?

Perhaps not that much. AdAge’s Nat Ives, whom Condé briefed on the move, explains the upshot:

Some things also stay the same. Condé Nast Digital will handle day-to-day contact with digital advertisers, but the Condé Nast Media Group retains the lead on most relationships. The magazines’ high-powered publishers aren’t getting any new incentives to sell digital. And everyone remembers that print still brings in almost all the revenue; digital absorbed at least its fair share of staff cuts that concluded 2008.

But Condé Nast executives point to the recession to explain why it’s finally found religion. ‘This economic experience that we are going through has sobered us up considerably,’ [Condé Nast CEO Charles] Townsend said. ‘To get back to double-digit growth, we have to put our digital assets to work hard. I am hoping that the print business will recover to double-digit growth, but I am convinced that the digital business will grow exponentially.’”

The problem here is that unlike Time Warner’s (TWX) Time Inc, Condé only has a few properties, liked Wired.com, that have enough scale to attract digital advertisers. Most of the ones associated with magazine titles, like Gourmet.com, VanityFair.com, etc., are simply too small to register.

And as long as Condé remains a magazine publisher that happens to have some Web properties, it’s hard to see how that will change.

Here’s the deal: If you work at a media company that hasn’t had layoffs recently, just go ahead and assume they’re coming.

This afternoon’s installment–CondéNet, which manages some, but not all, of media giant Condé Nast’s Web operations, is cutting staff “across the board.”

Which means not just cuts at Wired.com, as Alley Insider reported earlier this afternoon, but also sites like Epicurious and Style.com.

The company wouldn’t announce how many people are being let go.

But here is the official statement, from a CondéNet spokesperson:

Visibility for 2009 is very limited and we are adjusting all costs to prepare for slower revenue growth. The adjustments are across the board and include staff restructuring and some reduction. Despite the current environment, CondéNet will end the year slightly up over 2007. These moves will put the company in a stronger position to handle a challenging year ahead and for the business to benefit when the economy and the ad market start to rebound.”

This follows cuts at Condé Nast’s print titles last month, so it’s not that much of a shock.

A person familiar with the situation tells me that the CondéNet took longer to make its cuts because it hadn’t gotten a grip on 2008 sales and 2009 projections.

Now it has: The unit won’t hit its internal goal of 35 percent revenue growth for 2008, but should still “outperform the market,” I’m told. What I’m not told–whether that means the broader market for Web ads and display ads only.

Next year, the CondéNet group, run by Sarah Chubb (pictured above) expects a “modest” increase in revenue–likely something in high single or low double-digits.

As always, I’m happy to update my posts as I learn more. If you’ve got information on specific titles or people cut, please drop me a line. As always, I keep all correspondence anonymous: peter@allthingsd.com.

A second source says they’ve been told the staff will shrink down to three people and that a “plan would be worked out in the next couple of days.”

Also unclear: Which one of Condé’s digital units will end up adopting the Web site. Portfolio.com had been run as a standalone property. That made it a rarity at Condé, where most of magazines’ digital arms are run by its Magnet unit, and the rest are run by Sarah Chubb’s CondéNet group.

Confused? So are most Condé Nast staffers, who spend lots of time complaining about the publisher’s byzantine digital architecture. But you won’t hear them complaining too loudly right now–they’re trying to hang on to their jobs, or at least protect their exit packages.

Web site staffers were told about the cuts in a meeting led by General Manager Ari Brandt and publisher David Carey, who didn’t provide much detail, according to people who attended the meeting.

Portfolio.com staffers have been told they have been meeting their revenue goals for 2008 while the magazine has not. According to a person who attended the meeting, one of the staff’s braver souls asked Carey why the Web site was being punished more severely than the magazine.

“He gave a sort of corporate-speak answer, and what it appeared to boil down to is, is ‘This is a magazine company,’” says a person who attended the meeting. ”And it left the impression that the Web site was sacrificed to save the magazine.”

In a separate meeting, Portfolio magazine editor Joanne Lipman told her staff that the publication would cut some positions and publish 10 times a year instead of monthly.

UPDATE: A partial list of departing Portfolio staffers.

Time Warner’s Time Inc. (TWX) won’t be the only magazine publisher making cuts this fall: Condé Nast is trimming its sails, too.

The New York Observer reports that every title at the privately held publisher is being required to cut five percent from both its editorial and business ledgers, a number that MediaMemo hasn’t been able to confirm.

But I can tell you that the staff at Portfolio, Condé’s business magazine launched with equal parts fanfare and controversy last year, has been summoned to an all-hands meetings that should be starting … now. I’ll pass along more details as I get them.

UPDATE: A partial list of departing Portfolio staffers.

Recall that just two days ago Condé Nast publisher David Carey was expressing (guarded) optimism about advertising budgets next year. I’m guessing that if he were less optimistic, the cuts would be even larger.

And what about CondéNet, the Condé division that handles Web properties for some, but not all, of the publisher’s magazines? No comment, but one might imagine Sarah Chubb’s unit will be cutting back, too.

UPDATE: Condé is firing most of the staff of Portfolio.com, shrinking it from two dozen down to “single digits.”

UPDATE: I’m told that Portfolio staff has just been told the magazine will now be published 10 times a year, down from 12, and will cut five percent from its edit budget. (A second source says that will amount to 18 to 20 staffers) The December and January issues will be combined, as will the June and July issues.

UPDATE: One officially announced cut: Men’s Vogue will be shrunk down to a twice-yearly schedule. The one-paragraph release:

Men’s Vogue will be absorbed into Vogue and published in the spring and fall, it was announced today by Charles H. Townsend, President and C.E.O of Condé Nast Publications. It will continue to be edited by Jay Fielden.”

Disclosure: I’ve done freelance work for Vanity Fair.

Since everyone and their mother saw fit to grab and post BoomTown’s video of our prescient interview last month with Ars Technica’s founder Ken Fisher in the wake of its acquisition by Condé Nast to be announced today, we thought we should post it too–since we did it!

Boston-based Ars, one the largest and longest-running tech blogs, will become part of CondéNet’s Wired Digital group.

Here is our post on the site, which I love for its accuracy and breadth, despite some annoying attribution snafus it should fix tout de suite.

Also, who wouldn’t like the name, meaning the “Art of Technology,” suggested by a quote from the “father of medicine,” Hippocrates:

“Ars longa, vita brevis, occasio praeceps, experimentum periculosum, iudicium difficile,” which is translated as, “Life is short, [the] art long, opportunity fleeting, experiment treacherous, judgment difficult.”

And here is my video interview with Fisher:

To keep you abreast of tech news while he’s away, we’re compiling a daily digest of 10 must-read tech stories. Our Tech 10 appears below.

1. Bienvenue, iPhone: France Telecom has begun selling Apple’s cellphone at selected Orange stores in Paris and other cities. The device itself will cost about $1,106 with no plan attached, or 399 euros (about $590) with one of four “Orange for iPhone” plans, Computerworld notes, adding it will cost 100 euros ($148) to unlock the handset.
2. FCC Says ‘Uncle’: A proposal by Federal Communications Commission Chairman Kevin Martin to tightly regulate the cable TV industry has been “drastically” trimmed, reports the New York Times, which noted that Martin had sought more diverse programming and reduced cable costs.
3. Amazon: 1; Feds: 0. The federal government has lost its bid to compel Amazon to release details about the book-buying habits of thousands of its customers, according to Declan McCullogh on his blog, The Iconoclast. The Justice Department sought the information to prove its case against a former Madison, Wisc., city official accused of evading taxes in selling used books online.
4. Google, Online Snitch? The search colossus has voluntarily given the IP address of an Israeli blogger who used “Google Blogger” to allegedly slander municipal council members running for reelection, the Israeli Web site Globes Online reports, calling the move “unprecedented.”
5. YouTube, Censor? The popular video-sharing site has suspended the account of a well-known Egyptian anti-torture activist who posted videos of alleged brutality by a number of Egyptian policemen, Wael Abbas told Reuters, claiming that about 100 images he had sent were no longer available on YouTube.
6. But It Doesn’t Mind those CondéNet Vids: CondéNet is announcing today that it will distribute videos from its various consumer-interest Web sites via YouTube, The Wall Street Journal reports, adding that the deal is the latest in a series for Condé Nast Publications’ digital division.
7. LinkedIn Link to News Corp.? A “well-placed source” has told VentureBeat that News Corp. (owner of this site) is in talks to buy business-networking site LinkedIn. But LinkedIn CEO Dan Nye told Fortune’s Adam Lashinsky that “It would take a helluva lot” to get him to sell.
8. The Earth, Updated: Google Maps is updating its features, prompting Duncan Riley at TechCrunch to wonder if the new features won’t ultimately send Google Earth down the path of the dodo.
9. Feeling Insecure: Web applications and holes in Windows Office are the top concerns of Internet users, according to the annual security report by SANS, a computer training and security organization, in its Top 20 risk assessment for 2007.
10. How Green Is My Gaming? Greenpeace has released a report slamming Nintendo and Microsoft for making their video-game consoles with toxic chemicals, reports BusinessWeek, noting that the enviro group’s latest ranking of electronics firms this week also highlights questions over the environmental impact of the products and how much consumers care about them.

–posted by Associate Editor John Sullivan