The fuller context: As a result, the company invested in its interactive and integrated marketing businesses -- spending roughly $600 million since 2002 on launches, acquisitions and building out its existing Web sites, Griffin said, as well as redefining its editorial hiring approach.
Hopkins is the second big-name editorial hiring by Martin Clarke, publisher and editor-in-chief of Mail Online, following his recruitment of Piers Morgan as editor-at-large at its burgeoning US operation last September.
But Ross was serious and also terrifically lucky, and early editorial hires, like Katharine Angell (later Katharine White and Wolcott Gibbss, and the magical joint arrival of James Thurber and E. B. White drove the thing onward and upward, suddenly vibrant and solvent, here in the Depression.
That includes doubling the sales team, making big-name editorial hires, improving its video-production capabilities, and building its technical infrastructure, including its Thred platform.
Can we possibly expect new editorial hires not to at least check themselves before they write something negative about a CrunchFund company, lest it upset their ultimate AOL paymasters?
But in recent weeks, key changes at the magazines -- editorial hires, the suggestions of an owner, the cover subjects intended to dance off the newsstand and perhaps more suited to health or entertainment magazines -- suggest that the days of the newsweekly magazines acting as hard news arbiters may have finally ground to a halt.
That theory doesn't stand up to scrutiny either: as any starving HuffPost contributor will testify, Arianna's grip on the purse strings hasn't shown any signs of loosening since the acquisition — with dead-weight staffers being fired to pay for new editorial hires.
The New York Times abruptly fired its new "Nazi-befriending" editorial hire.
In March TMG also announced it was shedding 80 of its 550 editorial staff and hiring for 50 new digitally focused jobs, as part of moves to further merge the daily and Sunday papers into a seven-day operation.
Once again, circulation soared as Brown, with Conde Nast's millions, turned the title into a must-read, creating a potent editorial mix by hiring big-name writers including novelist William Styron, and photographers such as Helmut Newton.
That means hiring editorial staffers who know the community and also allowing them to curate stories from readers.
