Hasta La Creative!

Unlike his buttoned-up peers in the executive suite at Hearst, Troy Young doesn’t keep an office, nor does he wear designer suits to work. Rumors have even spread that he insisted on a contract provision saying he didn’t need to wear a necktie. He says there’s nothing about ties in the contract — though he claims to not own any.

But that’s not the only reason Mr. Young, hired in May by the privately held owner of Cosmopolitan and Esquire, is alien to the opulent Hearst Tower. His charge as president of Hearst Digital is to infuse a 126-year-old print brand founded on afternoon newspapers with the mentality and nimbleness of a digital startup. Redesigns of the magazine sites are on the way, as is an entirely new editorial mission for some of its online properties. “There’s never been more pressure for Hearst to be good at digital,” said Mr. Young.

But he could just as well been talking about the entire magazine industry, which is struggling to reinvent in the face of intense challenges online. Media empires like Hearst and Cond Nast are seeing their titles’ websites draw fewer visitors than upstarts such as BuzzFeed and Gawker. The industry as a whole is still laboring to recover ground lost during the recession, when ad pages plummeted 26% from 2008 to 2009, according to the Publishers Information Bureau. Through the first half of 2013, pages have declined 4.9%. Digital revenue hasn’t proved to be the savior.

Continue reading at AdAge.com