WITH the hard times continu ing to hurt Condé Nast, a number of the magazine giant’s most prominent editors and executives are shunning the chauffeur-driven Mercedes and taking the subway instead.
Among them: New Yorker Editor-in-Chief David Remnick, Gourmet Editor-in-Chief Ruth Reichl,, David Carey, a group executive president who oversees Golf Digest, Wired and Portfolio, and Portfolio Publisher William Li.
Given that Remnick spent a lot of time as a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter in Moscow for The Washington Post, he probably thinks nothing of trudging down into the subway on a cold morning.
His office declined to comment, but an insider noted a trek on the subway wouldn’t be too difficult: “He lives on the Upper West Side, two express stops away.”
Reichl, too, is an Upper West Sider. She said, “I’ve taken the subway for years. I was never one of those people who thought you had to have a town car.”
She probably developed her taste for the low-key approach during her years as The New York Times’ food critic, frequently donning wigs and other disguises so she could write reviews incognito.
Carey, meanwhile, is taking Metro North to Grand Central and then hoofing it over to Condé Nast’s headquarters at 4 Times Square.
“He’ll use [car service] at the odd time, if it’s pouring rain,” said one insider.
To be sure, as The Post reported Sunday, there has yet been no official edict from Chairman S.I. Newhouse Jr. or CEO Charles Townsend on the use of town cars.
One source said he noticed a lot of cars parked on West 44th Street in recent days, rather than out front of the tower.
“They want to hide them from Si and Chuck,” said the source.
But an insider said the cars on West 44th were parked there for people who were headed uptown and didn’t want to get bogged down driving around the block or in the construction of Bank of America’s new tower at Avenue of the Americas and 42nd Street.
“How can they hide it? They still have to submit the bills from Big Apple or Manhattan Limo,” one person quipped.
Meanwhile, news that all Newhouse-owned newspapers, from the Newark Star-Ledger to the Staten Island Ad vance, were going to im pose two- week furloughs has many in Condé Nast worried that the same thing could happen to them. Family owned Advance Publications is the parent company of both Newhouse Newspapers and Condé Nast.
The furlough idea was indeed considered prior to Townsend’s March 4 doomsday memo, in which he warned that tough times are ahead.
Sources say that while no decision has been made, and that there is no active plan to institute furloughs at the moment, it has been on the table for discussion.
The day of reckoning on that front may come in late June when publishers will definitively know how many ad pages they’ve sold for the crucial September issues.
Corporate spokeswoman Maurie Perl declined to comment on the furlough issue.
Crain’s drain
Crain’s New York Business has been off the newsstands in New York City since March 9 apparently as a result of a wholesaler dispute.
It’s the first time the paper hasn’t been for sale on area newsstands since Rance Crain launched the weekly in 1984 by handing out copies to commuters in Grand Central Terminal.
Newsstand sales actually don’t count for much of the publication’s 60,000 circulation.
“It was a tiny percentage less than 2 percent of the total circulation,” said Crain’s Publisher Jill Kaplan.
She said that parent Crain Communications found that a wholesaler had been reselling some of the discounted copies to a bulk buyer.
Asked if she expected a return to newsstands, she said, “I hope so.”
Hachette job
There are more signs of retrenchment at Hachette Filipacchi Media.
The company, led by CEO Alain Lemarchand, has put its enthusiast titles, including American Photo, Popular Photography, Sound & Vision, Boating and Flying, on the block.
The news was first reported by the Ad Age Web site.
Some press reports said that Cycle World, Car and Driver and Road & Track were on the block as well, but insiders insist that is not the case.
The company declined to comment. keith.kelly@nypost.com