Philly.com names Eric Grilly as online prez
If you haven't yet heard...
Erick Grilly has left MediaNews Group, where he was the top online executive and a senior vice president, to become the president of Philly.com, which publishes content from the Philadelphia Inquirer and Philadelphia Daily News.
Grilly had been vp for interactive media at the Denver Post, one of MediaNews Group's papers, and had previously worked for McClatchy's online group. In his most recent position, Grilly had been earning roughly $350k a year.
He'll oversee what's left of Philly.com's site overhaul, which is costing $2 million and is expected to launch early summer.
I'll be very interested to see what Grilly does with Philly.com, which has contracted with Clickability for its site architecture and new cms.
One of the major problems facing newspapers owned by corporate chains is the inflexibility of a corporate cms that must fit the needs of all its properties. In the case of Tribune Co., which is in the process of streamlining all of the newspaper websites within the chain, I can't imagine that a template that's been customized to work for the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Newsday or the Baltimore Sun will also work for the Hartford Courant, Morning Call and Hoy.
What Grilly is inheriting is a website that hasn't taken advantage of new web tools and a company that hasn't even begun to coax its reporters into thinking as multimedia reporters rather than newspapermen and women. On the other hand, he need only worry about two newspaper properties. And that means that if all the money spent to redesign philly.com results in a website that enables platform-agnostic sharing, user generated content, true multimedia features, a site architecture that makes sense and smartly-used advertising (read: no more floating pumpkin ads!)...then I think Grilly may be poised to challenge the traditional way in which newspapers are serving content on the web.
Now I'll leave you with a gripe: This is one more top-level position in digital journalism that went to a man. At a paper that ushered out Amanda Bennett, one of the only female Executive Editors in the country, and the woman who initiated blinq and the Inky's other blogs. I'd be very keen to learn how many women were brought in to interview with Brian Tierney for this job...methinks zero.
Seed Newsvine