MG Appoints Chief of Interactive Media
By JEFFREY KELLEY
Media General Inc. named a new president to its Interactive Media Division yesterday.
C. Kirk Read will start as the division’s president and a Media General vice president on June 1, the day current President Neal F. Fondren steps down.
Media General owns and operates newspapers, television stations and Web sites across the Southeast, including The Times-Dispatch and The Tampa Tribune. Its Interactive Media Division handles Web-based operations.
Read, 38, now serves as regional publisher of Media General’s Northern Virginia community newspapers, which includes three daily publications and associated Web sites. A Media General employee since 1995, Read helped create TBO.com, the company’s first property that converged the resources of a newspaper, The Tampa Tribune, and the Florida city’s NBC affiliate WFLA-TV.
There is still work to be done for Media General’s interactive division to become a success, Read said in a phone interview yesterday. He noted that foundations of a winning online enterprise start with the traditional media entities: newspapers and TV stations.
“The challenge is trying to get a direction and focus that helps you filter out noise and gets you down the road at the right clip with the right kind of scale,” he said. “We can’t do it on our own without strong relationships” to newspapers and TV stations, consumers and industry partners, he said.
Industry partnerships, for instance, would include Media General’s recent alliance with Yahoo! Inc. and a consortium of more than 200 other newspaper companies. With it, career-related advertising sold through newspaper Web sites is posted to Yahoo!’s HotJobs service for job seekers from across the country to access. Such a partnership may broaden a paper’s online audience.
Fondren, who has led Media General’s interactive division since January 2001, said on May 3 that he was stepping down. He plans to remain at the company for several months to assist in efforts to identify and pursue Internet acquisitions.
Contact staff writer Jeffrey Kelley at jkelley@timesdispatch.com or (804) 649-6348.
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