Now we know: No one.

Time Warner (TWX) has gone outside the company to pluck Moore’s successor, recruiting Meredith Corp. (MDP) publishing boss Jack Griffin to take her place. Griffin left his post on Monday to ““pursue another opportunity,” which turns out to be running the world’s largest magazine company.

Moore has been at Time Inc. since 1978 and has been running the company since 2002. She has a contract that runs through next year, but she’s apparently going to leave earlier than that. The New York Times reports that a formal announcement regarding the move is scheduled for next week.

That gives Time Inc. employees a few days to gather up a dossier on Griffin, who isn’t well known in New York publishing circles. That’s either a virtue or a downside when running a company based in Iowa.

Press reports about the impending move suggest that Griffin is supposed to accelerate Time Inc.’s move into digital, and point to his track record of acquiring and integrating nontraditional assets like Hyperfactory, a mobile marketing company. But Meredith hasn’t been aggressive about moving onto the Web or onto platforms like Apple’s iPad, so far. Then again, few of its titles–Ladies’ Home Journal, Better Homes and Gardens, etc.–seem like natural digital plays.

And, as I noted yesterday, Time Inc.’s paper-and-ink business is still a formidable one: Last quarter the company generated $153 million in operating income on revenue of $919 million. Profits were up 50 percent, due to layoffs and other cost cuts Moore undertook in the past few years, but revenue was flat.

Now it will be up to Griffin to move the top line, too.

What prompted Time Inc. to drop six percent of its staff?

Time Warner (TWX) won’t release its most recent quarterly results until next week. But you can get a pretty good sense of how its publishing unit has been doing by looking at the numbers that Iowa-based magazine giant Meredith Corp. (MDP) just released.

And it’s grim.

Revenues at Meredith’s publishing unit, which puts out titles like Better Homes and Gardens and Ladies’ Home Journal (that ad above is from a 1972 issue) dropped nine percent in the last year, to $300 million. But ad revenues fell much more steeply, dropping 18 percent to $148 million. And operating profit plummeted 40 percent, to $33 million.

The good news in the earnings release is that there are still operating profits. But these are worrisome results.

So far this year, most of the ad-based businesses that have complained about declining revenues have pointed to weakness in the financial and auto industries. But Meredith’s publications don’t rely on those sectors for their ads.

From the release:

Companies that operate in Meredith’s endemic advertising categories–including food and beverages, prescription and non-prescription drugs, and home–have been impacted greatly by the current economic downturn. Combined, Meredith magazine advertising revenues in these categories declined over 25 percent in the first quarter, according to Publishers Information Bureau (PIB).”

Not surprisingly, Meredith says that the current quarter looks depressing too. Publishing ad revenues are “down in the high teens” it says.

So, don’t be shocked to see equally lousy news from Time Inc. next week.

[Image Credit: jbcurio]