George Kliavkoff is headed to the Hearst Corporation to oversee the media company's digital investments.
(Credit: NBC Universal)George Kliavkoff, the former NBC Universal exec who helped conceive of Hulu, is joining the Hearst Corporation, the century-old company known more for newspapers than digital media.
Kliavkoff, who has one of the best track records for building digital media services from the ground up, will become the executive vice president and deputy group head of Hearst Entertainment & Syndication. He will report to the unit's president, Scott Sassa, the former CEO of Friendster and Uber.com.
The news was first reported by Peter Kafka at All Things Digital.
The unit Kliavkoff joins is responsible for managing the company's ownership stakes in cable companies, such as A&E Television Networks, the History Channel, and ESPN. The division also operates a television product unit, a newspaper syndication business, and a merchandise licensing unit. In addition to helping Sassa run those businesses, Kliavkoff told CNET News that that he will also oversee Hearst's "building, buying, and operating of new digital businesses."
Kliavkoff says Hearst wants to invest in both start-ups and also create companies on its own, which is what he did with Hulu, the popular video site.
Kliavkoff said in November, when he announced his departure from NBC, that he was ready for a new challenge. He certainly found one in Hearst.
Founded by William Randolph Hearst in 1887, a media tycoon that created a vast newspaper and magazine empire, the Hearst Corporation today is a huge communications conglomerate. In addition to more than 70 newspapers and 200 magazines, the privately held company also owns more than 25 TV stations, two radio stations, and significant stakes in cable channels.
According to estimates, Hearst generated more than $4.3 billion in revenues in 2007 and employs more than 17,000 workers. The company is controlled by Hearst's descendants. When asked whether the conglomerate has the assets to make significant investments, Kliavkoff said he couldn't discuss specifics but said the company was profitable.
At the same time Hearst tries to safely navigate the collapse of the newspaper sector (Hearst has said 2009 may see the closure of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and flagship paper the San Francisco Chronicle), the company is also looking for a way to profit from the Web. After all, the Internet is a communications medium and for a 121-year-old communications company, this should be in its wheelhouse.
But the company's record in digital investments have been mixed. Some of the companies it has an interest in are Pandora, Brightcove, Meta TV, MobiTV, and XM Satellite Radio. In the past several months, Hearst has announced the company would make a foray into electronics by building an electronic book reader. The device, which may launch this year, would be designed to boost the number of digital outlets for Hearst's print content. Managers also said they plan to start charging readers for some newspaper content.
Hiring the marquee name in digital entertainment is another sign that Hearst is serious about the Web. Upon his departure from NBC in November, Kliavkoff said "this is a best time to start, run, or invest in digital companies." He said then that he wanted to oversee this kind of investment but that it was getting harder for public companies to make those kinds of bets.
"It's also particularly great in this economic climate to be doing this kind of investment," Kliavkoff said, "and building in a private media company, which has the benefit of having a long-term perspective on growth, as opposed to having to worry as much on a quarter-by-quarter basis."
Besides helping draw the blueprint for Hulu, Kliavkoff, 41, oversaw NBC's online distribution of last year's Olympic games. Before NBC, he helped make Major League Baseball Advanced Media, the digital arm of professional baseball, the most successful subscription video site on the Web.
A good bet is that Kliavkoff, who started in digital media at RealNetworks, will look for ways to help Hearst use its video content to cash in on the Web.
Updated at 12:25 p.m. on Saturday with notes about Hearst's plans to charge for some content online.
It looks as if the e-paper revolution is really about to start.
Hearst, one of the largest media conglomerates in the world, announced on Friday that it has developed an electronic reader for newspapers and magazines, the way Amazon.com's new Kindle does for books. The publisher is also planning to put at least some of its online content behind a pay wall, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal.
Soon you'll be able to read magazines and newspapers on an e-reader.
(Credit: Theoprahmag.com)The e-reader news, first reported by Fortune magazine, is really significant, as Hearst owns about 16 daily and 49 weekly newspapers, and has a strong influence on hundreds of magazines. Examples of those include the San Francisco Chronicle, Oprah Winfrey's O, and Cosmopolitan.
It's unclear if the device Hearst has been working on has anything to do with the eReader that Plastic Logic unveiled recently, but its principle seems the same. It's a handheld device used to read digital content, much like the Kindle. The main difference would be that Hearst's e-reader has a much larger size to accommodate the format of newspapers and magazines.
At the same time as it is developing the device, Hearst is hoping for success in charging for access to at least some of its online content. A pay model for online content, as opposed to an advertising-supported free-access model, is something few publishers have managed to pull off.
Of the leading New York-based papers alone, The New York Times and News Corp.'s The Wall Street Journal have adopted, and backtracked on, both models. Cablevision's Newsday on Thursday also announced that it is implementing a pay-for-access model.
"Exactly how much paid content to hold back from our free sites will be a judgment call made daily by our management, whose mission should be to run the best free Web sites in our markets without compromising our ability to get a fair price from consumers for the expensive, unique reporting and writing that we produce each day," Steven Swartz, the president of Hearst newspapers, wrote in a staff memo obtained by the Journal.
Certainly, during a time in which papers right and left are folding under economic pressures or otherwise struggling to stay in operation, finding ways to profitably embrace digital media has become imperative for major and minor publishers alike.
"Our cost base is significantly out of line with the revenue available in our business today," Hearst's Swartz concluded, as he noted other advertising initiatives, such as partnering on advertising with real-estate site Zillow and Yahoo, and raising prices for print subscriptions and mobile-phone access to its content. "It is equally inescapable that during good times, our industry developed business practices that were, at best, inefficient."
It's also speculated that Hearst's e-reader is going to be physically flexible and even foldable. The first version would come in black and white, with a later model coming in color and even with video playback capability.
Once implemented, this would change the way newspapers and magazines are published. Instead of getting a print copy, you can just download the newest issues on the e-reader, wirelessly. No printing or paper is involved. Besides the environmental factor, this would cut down about 50 percent of the cost to circulate a periodical.
It's also not clear when you can get the first issue of Cosmopolitan on this new e-reader, but considering the recent launch of the Kindle 2 and the upcoming e-reader from Plastic Logic, Hearst's e-reader will probably be launched in 12 to 18 months.
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