In her first couple months as chief executive of Time Inc., the country’s largest magazine publisher, Laura Lang took some time to hold town hall style meetings and field questions from many of the company’s 9,000 employees. Those questions included:


“Do you think print is dead?”


“Will magazines survive?”


“Why did you come here?”


“In the beginning the questions were crazy,” Ms. Lang said in an interview in her 34th-floor corner office at the old Time & Life building where Henry Luce housed his magazine empire. She added: “This is a building full of journalists.”


Ms. Lang is not one of them. As the former chief executive of Digitas, a unit of the Publicis Groupe, Ms. Lang helped transform a direct-mail company into a successful digital advertising firm. But not until this past January had she been fully subjected to the cutthroat world of New York media.


She came at a tumultuous time for the magazine industry and the company. Her predecessor had been fired after less than six months on the job, leaving the publisher of Time, People, InStyle and Sports Illustrated without a chief for nearly a year. In the three months that ended March 31, adjusted operating income at Time Inc. fell 38 percent to $39 million, driven mostly by a 5 percent, or $19 million, drop in advertising revenue. Overall revenue at the publishing company has declined roughly 30 percent in the last five years.


Ms. Lang, who has largely stayed out of the press since taking the job, said she did not want to come in and portend the future of the magazine business. Instead, she quietly devoted her first months on the job to talking to employees. She traveled to Boston, Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles and London to meet with them. She convened senior executives in New York to review each magazine and assess what each one needs to thrive in a digital world. She enters Time Inc. as the first chief executive from outside the industry and a female leader in a company with a reputation for being hypermasculine and marketer-averse.


“The point of the process was to say we’re not going away in a room and shutting the door and whispering,” Ms. Lang said.


A polished Wharton M.B.A. with an upbeat demeanor, Ms. Lang speaks in the kind of friendly, on-brand vernacular of an advertising executive in a pitch meeting. Although her plans for Time Inc. are not yet completed, she said has homed in on the transition to mobile devices and the customizing of ads for marketers based on the vast amount of consumer data Time Inc. collects on readers. Her theory: if users’ personal information is a treasure trove for Silicon Valley businesses, it should be equally valuable to traditional media.


Ms. Lang talks about Time Inc. not as a magazine publisher, but as a branded news and entertainment company. She believes she can sell digital products to advertisers tailored to a level of specificity not previously available. Marketers hoping to reach new mothers, for instance, can incorporate messaging into an issue of People magazine (and its various app and online editions) with Jessica Simpson’s baby photos or Sandra Bullock’s announcement that she has adopted a child.


That’s not an entirely new goal, but Ms. Lang may be particularly suited to impose the strategy. As the Digitas chief she turned a traditional direct-mail service into a business that built and placed digital ad campaigns customized for Web sites and social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook. She also helped start the “newfronts” that take place around the time of the TV network’s upfronts, where advertisers see the coming slate of TV shows, and connect advertisers to online companies like YouTube and Hulu.


“We’ll be building lots of new products for advertisers” that use a similar approach, Ms. Lang said.


By Time Inc.’s estimates, its print and online magazines reach 130 million unduplicated consumers a month and the publisher has 65 million households in its database.