7 more get pink slips at rickety Newsweek

THE cutbacks at IBT Media continued Friday with the axing of seven from the Newsweek edit staff, adding to the nearly 30 staffers who were cut across the rest of the company’s titles last week.

The Newsweek cutbacks including National Editor Kevin Dolak, Tech Editor Grant Burningham, politics correspondent Taylor Wofford, tech writer Seung Lee, national security writer Jonathan Broder, general assignment reporter Winston Ross and Photo Editor Jared Miller.

One insider said that IBT co-founders Johnathan Davis and Etienne

Uzac seriously misjudged the trends in the overall digital market, which has faced relentless downward pricing pressure over the past six-to-eight months.

In mid-2015, it hired Chief Marketing Officer Mitchell Caplan, its first-ever CMO, a move that led its headcount to balloon to 210 from 150 a year earlier.

The company began moving from programmatic ad buying done automatically by robots to having its own sales force call on advertisers to try to up-sell the products as premium content.

But the strategy did not work. As the CPM (cost per thousand readers) began to erode, one source said, the executives at IBT “were in a total panic.”

Meanwhile, IBT’s digital traffic over the past year barely budged, inching up to 28.9 million visitors as of May, according to comScore.

The company is still said to be betting that it can get premium prices for Newsweek, which resumed a newsstand-only print edition in May 2014 after former owner Barry Diller’s IAC/InterActiveCorp shut print to save money.

Ali coverage

Esquire is hoping its second cover dedicated to Muhammad Ali — hitting newsstands nationally on Tues- day — will still sell, even though it comes weeks after Rolling Stone and a slew of weeklies offered up their Ali coverage.

Esquire had already closed its August issue on June 3 when it found that the former heavyweight champion had died that day.

“We started working on Friday and hustled over the weekend,” said Jay

Fielden, who had to rip up the pages on deadline. It is only his second issue of the monthly since taking over from David Granger.

Four days later he said they went to press with 10 pages devoted to Ali.

Esquire was responsible for one of the more iconic Ali covers from years past when its famed Art Director

George Lois hired Carl Fischer to photograph Ali with arrows sticking out of him reminiscent of the Christian martyr St. Sebastian. They used an outtake from a Fisher shoot for the second cover.

Newsstand sales figures for magazines that put Ali on the cover are not yet available but Texture, the digital newsstand said that Rolling Stone’s issue had one of the longest times spent by readers on Ali coverage — even though the weeklies were out first.

Ghosh moves on

Bobby Ghosh, the former editor of Time International, is now the editor-in-chief of the Hindustan Times, an English language daily in India. “Exhausted and exhilarated after my first day at Hindustan Times,” he posted on Facebook on July 4.

Ghosh recently left his job at Quartz.

His time at Quartz was short. He arrived at the digital news site owned by David Bradley’s Atlantic Media because, sources said, he was deeply unhappy with the cuts at Time.

He was named managing editor of Quartz in June 2014 and was a regular commentator on CNN. In May 2015, he was moved to editor at large and assigned to running Quartz Events, while

Heather Landy, formerly global news editor was promoted to managing editor.

Ghosh said in an e-mail to Media Ink: “I learned more in two years at [Quartz] than I could have imagined possible. And at CNN, I felt I was contributing to an international con- versation about important issues. But this was an offer I simply couldn’t turn down.”

Yahn remembered

Former Ad Age Editor-in-Chief Steve Yahn died on June 28 after a battle with Parkinson’s disease. He was 69 years old.

The freewheeling Yahn was the launch editor of Crain’s Chicago Business in 1978, the first of the regional business titles founded by Crain Communications.

He left the weekly at the end of its launch year. Yahn became executive editor of Ad Age in 1993 and editor in 1994 following the retire

ment of longtime editor Fred Danzig. “I was always very much in sync with Steve Yahn,” said Crain Communications President and Ad Age Editor-in-Chief Rance Crain. “He liked scoops and so did I.” A wake is scheduled for July 8 at Edward F. Carter Funeral Home in Croton on Hudson, NY, at 4 p.m. followed by a service at 7:30 p.m.