Now that Troy Young has been promoted to president of Hearst magazines, speculation is swirling on who will be the top lieutenants in the new regime.
Chief Content Officer Joanna Coles and President of Marketing Michael Clinton were longtime lieutenants of outgoing president and now chairman of magazines David Carey.
Young, 50, formerly the president of Hearst Digital, was promoted over his former colleagues to the top job on Wednesday — and in his first full day on the job, he was not tipping his hand about who will round out his “cabinet.”
“There’s a lot of things to be figured out,” Young said. Clinton and Coles, he said, “have contributed immensely to where Hearst is as a company today.”
As to whom he will pick as his top lieutenants, he said, “Nothing has been decided.”
Of the two, Clinton, the face of the company with big advertisers, seems more likely to stay. Coles, the highest profile editorial executive in the company, is seen as more likely to go, insiders say.
After getting bypassed for the top job eight years ago, Clinton reinvented himself as a loyal No. 2 to Carey and was rewarded with a seat on the parent company’s board of directors.
“I’ve been working with Troy for five years now, he’s an accomplished media executive and a great partner and I’m looking forward to continuing to evolve our business together,” Clinton wrote in a text to Media Ink.
“He’s tucked in,” one insider said of Clinton.
Coles was promoted from Marie Claire to Cosmopolitan, the company’s most profitable magazine.
She helped to keep Cosmo at the forefront of the media conversation — earning her a promotion to the company’s first-ever chief content officer and a role as executive producer of the cable show “The Bold Type,” starring Katie Stevens.
But Coles has been telling friends that she thinks her next stop could carry her somewhere beyond print.
Coles could not be reached at press time.
Young, a former head of Say Media who has run Hearst Digital for the past five years, saw digital traffic and revenue surge while print was struggling.
Carey had always portrayed the publisher of Cosmo, Esquire, Elle, Harper’s Bazaar and Good Housekeeping as a “digitally smart but print first” company.
Young is expected to push digital far more aggressively. “The thing that is most important is making great products,” he said.
“We’re a content company that distributes across many platforms.”
And a big challenge for Young will be getting consumers to pay for digital content that, because of robust advertising, is already contributing more than one third of the division’s profits and about 20 percent of its overall $3 billion in revenue.
