Today, All Things Digital made it onto Ad Age’s Digital A-List, which also includes Groupon, Buddy Media and Virgin America.

BoomTown loves Virgin America’s digital stuff (plus the hip food) .

Actually, Ad Age’s Nat Ives was very nice to us too, nailing what we’re about:

“All Things D has become a particular sort of powerhouse in the overheated space devoted to tech news. It’s part of Dow Jones, so it’s got that gravitas. But it’s got the speed and humor of a blog.”

Yes, quick and funny and very heavy–that pretty much sums up ATD.

You can read it all here.

It’s not close yet. But we are seeing signs that things are at least getting less bad. As Nat Ives notes, the slide in newsstand sales seems to have slowed in the second half of last year, and some titles are even reporting an uptick.

Meanwhile, industry heavyweight Time Inc. also had comparatively good news to report today-things are still down, but not as dire as they have been.

The numbers: The Time Warner (TWX) unit says Q4 subscription revenue was down six percent and ad sales were down 12 percent. Not stellar, but better than Q3, when they were down 13 percent and 22 percent, respectively.

The bottom line, in the meantime, helped by two rounds of major layoffs, stayed steady, with an operating margin of 14 percent.

It’s hard to tell how widespread the recovery is, because different titles have different stories to tell. Time Warner did note that its News unit–that includes Time, Fortune, etc.–lagged behind and that its Style group–overseen directly by CEO Ann Moore–did well.

“Well,” that is, by magazine standards: Revenue was flat in Q4, aided in large part by People magazine. (Now you can see why the Time Warner executive I talked to last year said it was hard to see the company dumping that title in particular.)

The company said that while ad dollars were down nine percent in the U.S., ad rates only shrank by “low single digits,” which is a bit encouraging. And Time Warner said numbers for the current quarter are improving over Q4.

Requisite caveat here: These numbers, and the ones you’re going to see for the next couple quarters, are being compared with really terrible numbers from previous quarters. So the fact that Time Inc. can’t show actual growth tells you that this is still an industry with really big problems. But maybe they’ll be more manageable than we thought–even without the help of a “magical and revolutionary device.”

Here’s the Q4 breakdown (click tables to enlarge):

And, for comparison’s sake, here are the Q3 numbers:

Here’s a novel approach from a coterie of big media brands, including the New York Times (NYT) and Disney’s (DIS) ESPN: Complain loudly that the search engine isn’t treating you fairly.

Ad Age’s Nat Ives reports that digital publishing executives, including John Kosner, who runs digital media for ESPN, and Martin Nisenholtz, who oversees digital at the Times, have been grousing that their stuff doesn’t show up high enough in Google’s (GOOG) search results.

That’s the same complaint that just about every Web site in the world has, because everyone knows the value of Google juice.

But Ives quotes publishers–all of whom are anonymous except for the two I’ve mentioned–who feel that their stuff deserves special treatment because their content is inherently more valuable, and because so much of the Web riffs off/rips off their work. In fact they’d probably point to this very post as an example of a derivative work that should show up lower on Google’s results than the original story.

But it’s unclear what the big guys think Google can actually do about this.

“Publishers said they’re not asking for a leg up over amateurs and link-happy bloggers. ‘This would in no way mean that only professional content publishers would get an advantage,’ one said. ‘It really just says that the original source, and the source with real access, should somehow be recognized as the most important in the delivery of results.’

Google says it’s trying but can’t just flip a switch to deliver pro publishers’ dreams. ‘There’s absolutely value to original content,’ a spokesman said. ‘There’s value to derivative content, too. We look at this in many ways from the point of view of the user. But the truth is there are so many shades of gray even within, quote, original content.’”

I’d also warn publishers to be careful of getting what they wish for. If Google was somehow able to train its bots and spiders to suss out material that was truly original, it’s entirely possible that many of the big guys wouldn’t be happy with those results, either.

[Image credit: bbaunach]

As I said, it’s a small victory.

But as long as we’re totaling those up, we may as well as look at Newsday’s performance in the last quarter, detailed in the Cablevision (CVC) earnings release posted this morning. The paper generated revenue of $107 million and adjusted operating cash flow of $10.3 million.

That is, if Jim Dolan and company hadn’t overpaid for the paper last summer, it would have churned out a decent profit in the last three months of 2008. Which underscores the point Ad Age’s Nat Ives made earlier this week: For all the moaning about the fate of the newspaper business, many individual papers are doing just fine, at least as operating businesses. It’s their publishers, who have taken on way too much debt and/or paid too much for the papers (just ask Rupert Murdoch), who have the real problems.

That won’t be much comfort to the employees at places like Hearst’s San Francisco Chronicle, who’ve been told they’ll need to make major concessions or the paper will fold. But we’ll take the good news anywhere we can find it these days.

Condé has tapped former Wired publisher and current New Yorker publisher Drew Schutte to be Condé Nast Digital’s chief revenue officer, a newly created position. The appointment follows last month’s (apparently) bloodless reorg of Condé’s digital properties, which are now consolidated under Sarah Chubb. Here’s a summary from Advertising Age’s Nat Ives, who broke the story:

Mr. Schutte was tapped to lead The New Yorker in January 2008 but was never as successful there–in an admittedly terrible year for most magazines–as in his previous role overseeing Wired magazine and Wired Digital. The New Yorker’s ad pages declined 26.8 percent last year, according to the Publishers Information Bureau.

Mr. Schutte wouldn’t necessarily have an easier job at Condé Nast Digital. Condé Nast is above all a magazine company, one whose efforts to build revenue online have not gained a lot of traction yet. Condé Nast Digital itself is a new formulation of company strategy in the area.

Condé, publisher of major titles such as Vogue and Vanity Fair, enjoyed a period of double-digit revenue growth earlier this decade, but the recession ended that. The company’s cooler, calmer approach–a departure from earlier years–also seems to have suffered. Last week Condé shut down Domino magazine.”

Ad Age recently estimated that Time Warner’s (TWX) Time Inc., the magazine company that has made the biggest strides in moving its properties online, is making more than 10 percent of its revenues from the Web. Time Warner reported yesterday that Time Inc. had seen a $57 million increase in annual sales from its digital properties last year.

Condé Press Release:

February 5, 2009 (New York, NY) — Drew Schutte has been named Senior Vice President & Chief Revenue Officer of Condé Nast Digital, it was announced today by Charles H. Townsend, President and C.E.O. of Condé Nast.  This newly created position takes effect immediately.

Mr. Schutte will be responsible for all sales and marketing for Condé Nast Digital. He will manage the newly consolidated digital sales team and work closely with the publishers on integrated sales throughout all of the company’s titles.

“Drew has a proven track record of selling online and print—as well as an understanding of the complexity of selling integrated campaigns–which makes him uniquely qualified for the job,” Mr. Townsend said.

Mr. Schutte became VP & Publisher of The New Yorker in January 2007. Previously he was VP & Publishing Director of Wired Media. He joined the magazine in 1994 as West Coast Advertising Manager.  Before joining Wired, Mr. Schutte spent three years at Business Week based in San Francisco. Prior to that he was East Coast Manager for PC Week and West Coast Manager for Inc.

Mr. Townsend also announced that Lisa Hughes is being named Vice President & Publisher of The New Yorker. Her position is effective immediately.

“Lisa is an experienced publisher, a strategic thinker, and an innovative marketer who is inherently well suited to lead the business side of The New Yorker,” Mr. Townsend said.

Ms. Hughes has been Vice President & Publisher of Condé Nast Traveler since 1995 and has guided it through some of its most successful years. In 2008, Condé Nast Traveler was named to both Adweek’s “Hotlist” and Advertising Age’s “A-List.” Previously, she held positions as VP & Publisher of House & Garden, and as Associate Publisher of Vanity Fair.  Ms. Hughes began her career at Condé Nast in sales at Mademoiselle.

Condé Nast, a unit of Advance Publications, includes twenty-three consumer magazines, Condé Nast Digital, the Fairchild Fashion Group, Parade, the Condé Nast Media Group, and the Shared Services Centers.

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.