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SpinMedia fires staff, ceases printing Vibe
By Aly Barchi | Published on Monday 15 September 2014
So, Stephen Blackwell’s first significant (read: drastic) action as the new CEO of SpinMedia has been to fire nineteen of the company’s staffers, and to axe the print edition of Vibe magazine, which Spin acquired last year. Clearly Steve is not a man to be trifled with.
Speaking to Capital NY, Blackwell said that some of the axed jobs were directly linked to the print version of Vibe, and were therefore redundant roles. He added: “If we’re not going to be putting together print pages anymore and designing print, we really don’t need those design platforms. We really don’t need the capacity to negotiate with printers”.
Blackwell’s cancelling of the printed Vibe isn’t a massive shock really, most of us having actually expected the shift to online-only sooner, given that’s what the company, then Buzzmedia, did to Spin magazine after acquiring it in 2012. As with Spin, Vibe will live on as a digital brand, Blackwell’s plan being to drive growth and traffic across SpinMedia’s portfolio of digital channels.
Blackwell told Capital on his decision to make Vibe too an online-only title: “When I look at what was going on here prior to my tenure, I think that some of the resources… if we’re directing resources toward print, that intrinsically means that we’re directing resources away from digital. I’m here to commit to directing all of our resources toward the digital side of Vibe”.
