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Steve Smith, Iris Dorbian & Bryan Wassel
Move over GPs, VPs, and CFOs—there’s a new breed of magazine leader rocketing up the ranks. With digital media revenue for magazine publishing companies not only providing the biggest source of growth, but also in some cases providing the biggest contribution to overall revenues, digitally-minded executives are becoming more important to their organizations, many of them often sitting at the right hand of the CEO. Watch as these 11 players shoot to the top in the coming year.
Wenda Harris Millard
President of Media,
Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia
A self-professed media junkie, Millard, who was inducted into min’s Digital Hall of Fame in 2006, has been a trailblazer since the early days of the Internet. Having amassed over 25 years of experience in publishing and advertising, Millard’s turned the nascent online community on its head with her work at DoubleClick, an Internet advertising agency that she co-founded. There she played an instrumental role in establishing the DoubleClick brand. Recently, Millard, who holds an MBA from Harvard University, has landed at Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, becoming its president of media. "One of the primary challenges for us—and for every media company—is the speed of change in the digital space. We're all racing to keep pace with new and emerging developments to enhance the customer experience and also serve the interests of marketers," said Millard. The good news is, Millard sees this as opportunity: "As media executives and marketers, the online world gives us the opportunity to evolve and invent and improve every single day. There's just never been a more exciting time to be in the communications business."
Prescott Shibles
Vice President of eMedia,
Penton Media, Inc.
The digital media guru of Penton Media, Inc., Prescott Shibles has his hands full this year in launching Reel-Exchange, a social networking site for video professionals. The site was developed in just four months of work, and unveiled to positive reception by critics and user alike. Shibles recognized the changing climate and growing importance of online networking in not only social but B2B sectors, and was able to capitalize on it with both speed and quality, noting that the “adverting climate is always changing.” Shibles is also always on the cutting edge, finding the best way to deal with whatever new tech is being implemented: “We always go after what the best tool is for [a new] technology,” he says.
Robin Wolaner
Founder of Parenting, publisher
of the newly launched TBD.com
Robin Wolaner is fully cognizant of the upward battle her site faces in the increasingly competitive digital realm. “I think being a hybrid is an interesting challenge,” she says. “On TBD.com, we fight against the idea of people using a real name. How you enable content sharing and also preserve user privacy is a challenge.”
Right now, Wolaner is casting her eye on the future. “In the next six months, we want to keep user engagement growing,” she says. “We just started selling advertising for TBD.com. Will that be our ultimate business model? I don’t know.” Even for a digital pioneer—especially for one—the digital future can be murky.
Jeff DeBalko
Chief Internet Officer,
Reed Business Information
Like many multi-title B2B publishers, Reed Business Information found itself pursuing different Internet strategies for every segment. This past year, Chief Internet Officer Jeff DeBalko helped implement a best practices program that identified what was working at RBI’s top performers and started implementing his “premium site model” across 23 re-launches like KidsToday.com and MultichannelNews.com. “The fact is that 80% to 90% of what we need to do to run a successful B2B online media business doesn’t change based on the vertical you are in,” he argues. And so, the optimized model focuses on engagement regardless of the industry: more blogs; user-feedback on all stories; and greater tools for search and aggregation of other people’s content. DeBalko represents a take-charge approach to digitizing old media, old business models, and even old editorial presumptions. To keep readers and generate real leads for advertisers, online businesses need to embrace—not ignore—the ways their users actually move across multiple sources and interact. “The editor’s and brand’s role is that we create great content but also expose you to different voices and engage users,” he says.
Rafat Ali
Editor/Publisher/CEO,
ContentNext
One media executive recently told Rafat Ali, publisher, ContentNext, that he sees the paidContent newsletter “earlier than I see my wife in the morning.” Ali says, “that is what I had in mind.” Not getting between husbands and wives so much as being the first source of business news for the mediacracy by 6:30 am each day. Ali is seriously connected, fielding tips and breaking stories across his flagship brand as well as the newer spin-offs mocoNews.net (mobile content) and contentSutra (Indian media). Ali hit the big time this year, hiring a COO and growing from five employees to 22, leaving his bedroom for a formal office (525 Broadway...in Santa Monica). Whether from bed or desk, Ali gets the scoops because sources trust him to get it right and put the business deals, closings and new developments online first. “We look at the stories as mission-critical to someone working at a media company now,” he says. “News and breaking news matter, and the B2B industry needs to do it more.”
Roger Neal
Senior Vice President and General Manager,
BusinessWeek Digital
For almost 15 years, Roger Neal, senior vice president and general manager of BusinessWeek Digital, has been a quiet supernova in the world of digital publishing.
It's hard to pin down the biggest success at a BW.com that, under Neal and executive editor John Byrne, sees almost 3 million visitors a month, but one that Neal is particularly proud of was launching McGraw-Hill's Insight Center. “It’s been a great learning experience. It is built in cooperation with Capital IQ, a McGraw Hill division of Standard & Poor’s and it’s deep research on each company encompassing BusinessWeek content, aggregated content and Capital IQ data. We built it so it would be optimized for search. It’s had a dramatic impact on traffic from search. One of the learning experiences was that it drove a lot of people to BusinessWeek content, in particular. So it’s kind of the best of all possible worlds.”
Paul Maidment
Editor,
Forbes.com
Working online for over a decade and with Forbes.com since 2001, Paul Maidment is a digital media veteran, one of the original Titans. This year, Forbes.com has improved with applications such as a corporate organizational wiki, keeping track of who reports to whom in various companies. His ultimate goal is to keep Forbes.com growing in the increasingly competitive field of business information. Maidment is doing this by pioneering new uses of video on the Web. According to Maidment, Web video is in a similar phase as when television was considered “radio with pictures,” and he hopes to help mature it beyond “television on the Internet.”
Brian Quinn
VP, Sales and Marketing,
Dow Jones Online
Working with The Wall Street Journal’s online incarnation, WSJ.com, Brian Quinn has helped the respected brand make its mark on the Web by concentrating on what the print version can’t deliver: video. WSJ reporters now bring digital camcorders with them while covering stories, giving them an additional angle that can be added to the digital version of their work. These videos make for more than traditional business stories, capturing powerful moments on tap and showing that WSJ stories and editorials are about more than just stocks, bonds, and business; they're about people, events, and the livable, visible world—best covered by mobile video recorders and brought to you by WSJ.com.
Chuck Cordray
VP Digital Media,
Hearst
In less than two years, Chuck Cordray has brought Hearst’s online presence from being almost completely dependent on outsourcing to being constantly tinkered and improved by a completely in-house team. Starting from scratch, he and his team have relaunched 14 Web sites and launched nine mobile sites, updating and keeping them “constantly changing and fresh” to take advantage the fast-growing medium. Under Cordray’s guidance, Esquire.com alone has been redesigned twice already, upgrading to keep up with the latest in Web design and technology. Cordray understands that if you're not moving at cyber-speed, then you're going to be left behind.
Paul Miller
President,
CMP Electronics Group
The Web is often referred to as its own world, and Paul Miller and CMP Electronics Group helped give this new meaning by literally creating a new world—Dr. Dobb's island in SecondLife, a persistent online 3D world, last August. This marked the first major media company creating a permanent presence in the increasingly popular graphic social network. Events held in-game have attracted thousands of participants. The virtual panels, keynotes, and avatar crowded networking events take online social networking in a business context to level 2.0. According to Miller, immersive environments are becoming one of the hottest aspects of the Internet, and under his guidance CMP is taking the initiative.
Todd Anderman
President,
Maxim Digital
President for Maxim Digital, Todd Anderman, gets it. “People are not going to Web sites for the same reason they are going to magazines,” he says. Unlike many others in the business, his mantra is apparent at MaximOnline and Blender.com, where he stresses very timely multimedia takes on the real-time trends driving Web traffic. At MaximOnline the Right Now section deftly riffs on the day’s hot pop culture topics. For Anderman, the connection to the magazines is always there in tone and content but “you shouldn’t force it,” he says. Next year, keep an eye on Anderman and co. as they bring these principles (along with a ton of video) to their portable versions of the brands on VerizonWireless and the mobile Web. Is that a Hometown Hottie in your pocket?
- min magazine 2008 — August 14, 2008
- 21 Most Intriguing: Harry McCracken — November 14, 2007
- 21 Most Intriguing: David Nussbaum — November 14, 2007
- The 21 Most Intriguing: The Swashbuckler: Marta Wöhrle — November 1, 2006
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 Steve Smith
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