Shakeup at Maven
SI company replaces top exec amid turmoil
M
AVEN, the publisher of Sports Illustrated, The Street and other online news sites, said its embattled chief executive, James Heckman, will be replaced by veteran media exec Ross Levinsohn, who most recently served as CEO of SI.
Heckman’s relationship had lately grown strained with Authentic Brands Group (ABG), which owns the intellectual property of SI, as the licensing giant worried that controversies swirling around SI in recent months were damaging the magazine’s brand as ABG looked to make other deals with its property beyond the media world.
Last October, Heckman fired close to 50 SI staffers — many of them senior writers with the magazine for decades — as he pushed to focus on quick-breaking news in pro and college sports instead of long-form journalism, which was a hallmark of the magazine in its heyday. The every-other-week magazine under previous owner Meredith was cut back to monthly with specials, such as the SI Swimsuit issue, under Maven.
Staffers, fearful of more cuts to the venerable-but-struggling sports brand, voted to unionize with the NewsGuild of New York shortly after the deep cuts. This year, SI has nevertheless cut staff and salaries twice after the coronavirus ravaged the ad base.
Since then, Heckman has run into controversy over Maven hosting a Blue Lives Matter Web site on its ad platform after the Minneapolis police slaying of George
Floyd in May. After a tumultuous town-hall meeting with SI staffers in June, Heckman reluctantly dehosted the pro-cop site.
And earlier this month, Maven got slapped with a $1 million lawsuit from Meredith, which claimed Maven still owed it unpaid fees from a six-month ownership transition. Maven counters that Meredith had padded SI’s business files with recycled subscriptions from the shut-down Money magazine and that digital traffic was overstated. The suit is still pending.
“Heckman is a dealmaker and a disrupter but there is good disruption and bad disruption,” said one source close to the situation. “There are so many problems in media these days, why pick fights with Meredith, why pick fights with ABG?”
Ultimately, the decision to remove Heckman was made by the board of publicly traded Maven. “I think the noise level got to be too much for the investors,” said one source. His successor, Levinsohn — a former interim CEO of Yahoo, a short-lived publisher of the LA Times and former president of Fox Digital Media — was brought in early last year when Maven acquired the rights to publish SI in a licensing deal with ABG, which in May 2019 purchased the iconic magazine brand from Meredith. An announcement late Wednesday said Heckman will be an adviser to Levinsohn. Heckman, a past CEO of Rivals.com and Scout.com, had worked for Levinsohn at Fox and Yahoo. In a prepared statement, Levinsohn said, “This is a unique opportunity to lead a technology and media company during a dynamic time of change in both spaces. I’m excited to partner with a powerful array of incredible brands, partners and a world-class team of executives and employees.”
It’s a new Dawn
Condé Nast has tapped Dawn Davis as the new editor in chief of Bon Appétit after racial controversies ousted the food mag’s top editor earlier this summer.
An award-winning book editor known for promoting marginalized voices, Davis was most recently vice president and publisher of 37 Ink, an imprint of Simon & Schuster.
She replaced longtime editor in chief Adam Rapoport, who stepped down in June amid outcry over a 2013 Instagram post of him wearing “brown face” in a Puerto Rican costume for a Halloween party.
Since then the publication has been mired in controversy of lack of inclusiveness on its food pages and underpayment of people of color in its video department.
“A proven trailblazer in publishing and known for her innovative approach, Dawn’s ability to find emerging voices and give them the platforms to transform our society is unparalleled,” said Condé Nast CEO Roger Lynch.