With the announcement yesterday that new owner Bruce Wasserstein has named Adam Moss editor in chief of New York magazine, all the talk now is of what Moss will do and must do to wake up a magazine that's been in slow decline over the years it was owned by Primedia.
   Moss is certainly the best choice for the turnaround, and the only real surprise is that he was willing to leave The New York Times, where he'd recently risen from editor of the Sunday magazine to become the paper's effective culture czar as an assistant managing editor under new editor Bill Keller.
    Moss, 46, spent 12 years at the Times, most of them as editor of the Sunday magazine, and before that he was editor of 7 Days, a lively if short-lived New York weekly. He's also worked at Esquire and Rolling Stone. He's a supreme magazine editor with deep sense of New York as a city and, perhaps more important, a state of mind. Moss can be expected draw top writers from his extensive Rolodex.
   To turn New York around, the magazine needs several things, and leading that list is money, a willingness by Wasserstein to invest in rebuilding the magazine on the business side. Wasserstein, who bid $55 million to acquire the title, has made that commitment to Moss, and that was a key factor in his decision to leave The Times. But Wasserstein, who also owns The Deal and American Lawyer, is not known as a lavish spender on his other titles.
   New York needs editorial independence, which is to say Wasserstein, having chosen his editor, must leave the editing of New York to Moss and busy himself with rebuilding the business side.
    Will Wasserstein stay out of editorial?
   Bosses make lousy editors. Former Primedia boss Tom Rogers was notorious for interfering with New York's editorial under departing editor Caroline Miller, when his time would have been better spent fending off the collapse of Primedia. The effect was to dumb down the magazine, denuding it of much of its edge under such former editors as Ed Kosner.
   New York has dwindled down to the sort of best-of journalism that you find in city magazines in even small bergs across America these days.
   But most importantly, Moss must recapture the spirit of New York from its founding in 1968 by the legendary Clay Felker as a must-read for sophisticated New Yorkers.
  That spirit has been entirely lost, ceded largely to Time Out New York and the New York Observer.
   It must become hip again.
   “It really relates to a willingness to take risks and cause trouble and be controversial,” one former editor, Michael Hirschorn, told Media Life back in October after the magazine was put up for auction. 
   "Ideally, New York magazine should be the most adventurous, surprising, intelligent magazine out there because it has the most overeducated, worldly readership out there.”
  New York under Moss must return to running tough stories that bend people's noses out of joint. That means investigative pieces that uncover scandals that are not being sniffed out by the dailies, most notably The Times.
   New York under Moss must revive its once-great coverage of the city and city government and politics. 
    At its best, it wrote with a unique intelligence about how the city really worked and how politics affected policy making, yet without ever losing its affection for its city. It suffered none of the breathlessness of the city's nightly TV news reporters over this or that latest assault on the dignity of New Yorkers. It was smarter and more insightful.
   New York under Moss must revive its coverage of Washington and the rest of the country from a unique New York perspective, which was the source of some of its smartest writing over the years. New York City, alas, is not really like the rest of America, or anywhere else for that matter.  And if it were, it would prefer not to think so.
  New York under Moss must return to publishing the great feature writing of earlier years. What made New York successful was a mix of best-of stories, what newspaper editors call service features, and stories that delved into emerging social trends. Its editors were the best at spotting them before other publications, and that accounted for much of New York's reputation as a hip, must-read publication.
    The writing had a voice, often a personal voice, and editors encouraged that.
   New York under Moss must revive its once closely read arts coverage and reviews. At its best, its critics were informed, highly opinionated, irascible and a hoot to read even if you disagreed with every sentence they wrote. And for that reason they were paid attention to.
  Magazines are ever-changing propositions and the most dangerous thing a magazine can do is cling to or attempt to return to its past. But in the case of New York, it is precisely the right thing to do. And Moss can make it work.