(FORTUNE Magazine) – When FORTUNE last checked in with Primedia (see "The Weirdest Mishmash in Media" in the fortune.com archive), CEO Tom Rogers had just completed a series of high-profile Internet deals--including a $690 million merger with About.com and an investment in Powerful Media's Inside.com. Rogers' refrain was awfully familiar: He hoped to transform Primedia, the publisher of more than 200 magazines--from Seventeen to Soybean Digest--into a dizzying agglomeration of print, broadcast, and online properties.

Three months later, Rogers is forging a pre-Internet future. In what one former executive called "a 180-degree turn in strategy," Rogers announced that Primedia had acquired U.K. magazine publisher EMAP's U.S. division for $515 million. It's a deal reminiscent of the old Primedia: In fact, former CEO William Riley had pursued a deal with EMAP several years earlier and had even joined Texas Pacific Group's current bid for the company, until a severance dispute with Primedia forced him to withdraw.

The acquisition makes Primedia the world's second-largest magazine publisher, after AOL Time Warner (parent of FORTUNE's publisher), and gussies up the company for Wall Street analysts, who have been less than enthusiastic about Rogers' Internet strategy. Shares trade around $7, down 70% from their high. "The EMAP acquisition gives Primedia a great strategic fit at a great price," says Michael Beebe, Goldman Sachs' media analyst.

Indeed, Primedia picked up EMAP's 60 magazines and other media properties for a song--two-thirds less than the $1.5 billion EMAP paid for them just two years ago. So is the company abandoning its multimedia strategy? No, says John Laughlin, head of Primedia's consumer magazine division, just shifting emphasis. "[EMAP's] magazine brands will give us a nucleus on which to build other multimedia properties," he says. Easier said than done. Primedia is still wrestling with another renovation project: folding About.com's 700 sites into the company.