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FEATURES
Min's 2008 Hall of Fame Inductee Winner Profiles
This year, our min's Best of the Web awards went to some of the industry's biggest and brightest in digital publishing. See below for a list of winner profiles, complete with pictures and video.
digital hall of fame
We introduced the Digital Hall of Fame three years ago, honoring the people who believed in the power and potential of the Internet before it became de rigueur, making online leaps of faith that paid off – and big. Here, we honor five new inductees who have earned their digital publishing stripes. Fran Hauser » People Group Digital If Wikipedia had an entry for magazine brand online success stories, People.com would be the picture beside the definition. Under Fran Hauser’s leadership, the site has become a model for how print brands can not only compete against portals, TV and the blogosphere, but how they can dominate. For much of its early life online, the People brand peeked in and out of the AOL subscription wall until several years ago when it fully embraced the Web, its ad model and what proved to be pent-up demand for quality entertainment content. “We compete with any site that has female readers,” Fran once said. But the most impressive part of her success at People.com is that she and the brand made their digital mark the old-fashioned magazine way, with authoritative, exclusive content. In a Web universe where celebrity rumor has the potency and speed of a super-virus, People provides the real-story. Even the most jaded gossip-mongers online know to go to People.com for the real story. In the online iterations of “50 Most Beautiful People” and “Sexiest Man Alive,” Fran and People.com have extended the print franchises into digital mainstays. But at the same time, the site’s real-time coverage of the entire awards season, its daily scoops and the incredibly deep celebrity directories give People.com and now PeopleenEspanol.com digital identities all their own. As the site approaches the staggering milestone of 1 billion monthly page views, Fran has helped crown People.com queen of celebrity online media. Jason Kint » SVP, General Manager, CBSSports.com Long before Facebook or MySpace blipped onto industry radar, and when online community at most sites was a forgotten ghetto, Jason Kint was pioneering user-generated content for major media brands. At SportingNews.com he was among the first in this industry to leverage the wisdom of the crowd…and respect its authority. Willing to recognize the expertise of his readers, Jason created tools that made the audience into editorial collaborators. The Sporting News lets readers create their own profiles, rate one another’s posts and participate respectfully in a massively active and self-regulating community of pro-am commentators. While most media sites were still reticent to open blogs, Jason was among the first site managers to make blogs one of his site’s primary channels for news and commentary, and a direct path to user involvement. And at the same time he brought the readers onto the front page, quoting their posts and showing the commentary activity surrounding every headline. For advertisers, he helped craft a clean, well-lit environment that was anything but a ghetto of stray snipes. More recently as general manager at CBSSports.com, he has helped rebrand the company and reshape it as a multi-platform brand. The site’s live streaming of all 63 games of the NCCA Men’s Championship has become one of the milestones in the evolution of video online. Jason has been integral to weaving together the authority of branded media with the energy of the audience. If the future of media is in learning to share control, authority and even content creation with our users, then Jason is one of the industry’s early researchers and teachers. Caroline Little » Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive It is rare enough to find a “veteran” in the digital world with over a decade of experience. It is rarer still when the CEO of a major online force has been identified with that brand for most of her online career. Since joining Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive in 1997, Caroline Little has been a central player in one of the Internet’s most highly evolved and visionary digital media companies. Starting as general counsel after working for U.S. News, Atlantic Monthly and Fast Company, she eventually became chief operating officer and finally CEO and Publisher in 2004, succeeding Christopher Schroeder. During her tenure Washingtonpost.Newsweek has moved aggressively to develop new content channels as well as explore emerging media. Whether it is incorporating a content recommendation engine, erecting enormous wells of columnist blogs before it was fashionable, or running one of the first HD video podcasts from a news organization, WPNI has been unafraid to experiment. For years in the pages of min we recounted how the WPNI brands virtually transformed the online slideshow into rich, journalistically deep new experiences. The company’s purchase of Slate.com wisely incorporated one of the Web’s truly great and native content brands. The recent launch of the eco-conscious Sprig.com demonstrates Caroline’s eagerness to leverage WPNI editorial expertise and technology experience into new niches and business models. In the seven years of leadership positions at WPNI, she has shown how a venerable newspaper and magazine brand can be as spry and innovative as a start-up. Jamie Pallot » CondéNet In the print world we have Granger, McCracken, Remnick, Wintour and countless other editors whose names are married to their magazines. The young and volatile Web has produced few counterparts who have navigated their brands so long and hard. CondéNet’s editorial director Jamie Pallot is the exceptional exception. For years, his name and sure hand have been indistinguishable from Style.com, which he helped rebuild and establish as one of the important and alluring fashion destinations online. Even in the dark days of the post-bubble Web era, Jamie showed that lush production values, high quality content and marquee advertisers could find a home online. Under his leadership, Style.com traffic and sales grew 40% to 50% three years in a row. The site is a regular recipient of ASME, min and Webby awards. He has a good eye for talent, and hired both Tanya Steel at Epicurious and Peter Frank at Concierge after assuming the role of editorial director at CondéNet in 2003. With Men.style.com in 2005, he extended the Style.com juggernaut into a surprisingly popular destination for fashion-conscious men and a safe haven for their most prestigious advertisers. Last year, Jamie helped launch an innovative experiment in social media for teens, Flip.com, and oversaw an enormously successful relaunch of Epicurious.com. For all that CondéNet has expanded into new areas and acquired new businesses, one thing always stays the same: Jamie has been principally responsible for extending the great editorial voice and lush look and feel of the Condé Nast legacy into the CondéNet brand. Stephen Saunders » TechWeb In a trade publishing world that has been famously slow to adopt new media, Stephen Saunders demonstrates how the Web can add fresh voices, business models and spirit to B2B. As the founder of Light Reading in 2000, he led the way in providing a Web-based primary source of business news and market intelligence to the growing telecommunications industry. He helped pioneer a Web-based integrated media publishing model that blended news, commentary, deep research and events in ways that other content-driven companies are only beginning to follow. And with Light Reading, which grew to be the largest provider of telecom information worldwide, Stephen also shows that trade media can have punch, bite and wit. Stephen’s mascot and occasional editorial partner at Light Reading, “Larry the Monkey,” continues to throw coconuts at the industry from his permanent tree house at the main site. When United Business Media (then CMP) purchased Light Reading in 2005, Stephen took over the CMP Communications unit. Now he is extending the innovations he pioneered at Light Reading with Internet Evolution. He has created a unique virtual think tank, where over 80 world-famous Internet experts and entrepreneurs, from Craig of Craigslist to the CIO of the Defense Department, create the premier Web 2.0 brain trust. Through novel content creation, imaginative business models and monkey-like flexibility, Stephen Saunders reminds us that start-up spunk can thrive even in the big media zoo.
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