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Philly Mag Now Being Run by the Guy Who Oversaw Calkins Media Acquisition and Cuts
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Philly Mag’s parent company has a new boss.
Not sure if you’ve heard the name Kirk Davis, but he’s a 59-year-old former GateHouse Media executive. He’s now taking over as the CEO of Metro Corp. Publishing, beginning on June 1st.
Jeff Blumenthal at the Philadelphia Business Journal with more details:
He replaces Nick Fischer, the company’s CEO since David Lipson, whose family has owned Metro Corp since 1946, stepped down from that role last year. Metro Corp. also owns Boston Magazine.
In a press release Tuesday, Metro Corp. said Fischer had only been serving as “interim” CEO, even though he did not have that tag on his title when the longtime management consultant started the role last year. In an interview Tuesday, Lipson said Fischer was brought in after Metro Corp. retained the management consulting firm Cadilus, which Fischer co-founded. The idea was to navigate the company through the pandemic and turn around its financial fortunes.
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Lipson, who retained his role as chairman of the company as well as being the third-generation owner with his two siblings, admitted that because Metro Corp. was adversely impacted by the recession, the company had to lay off several employees. He did not give specific numbers. Last July, the company said it laid off eight and placed another 13 on furlough as part of a restructuring plan. Moving forward, though, Lipson said he wants the company to emerge from the pandemic in growth mode.
Davis left GateHouse in August 2019, just as publicly traded parent company New Media Investment Corp. acquired Gannett Co. for $1.2 billion. In the union of the two largest U.S newspaper chains, the Gannett name is the one that survived.
GateHouse was the company that acquired Calkins Media back in 2017. Calkins was the group that published The Bucks County Courier Times, The Burlington County Times, and The Doylestown Intelligencer. GateHouse then merged with Gannett, which saw the Courier-Post and Wilmington’s News Journal become part of the portfolio.
Ultimately, this sequence of events resulted in the departure of sports writers Kevin Cooney and Dave Isaac. Tom Moore, formerly a Sixers writer, was moved to a general assignment role, and layoffs and buyouts preceded a furlough implementation during the pandemic.
We’ll see what happens here with Philly Mag. It’s not a legacy newspaper, and Metro Corp. is a much smaller entity, so maybe they can avoid layoffs and buyouts since the situation is not the same as completing a big merger. Philly Mag no longer does sports, but employed Derek Bodner back in the day and used to host the excellent Birds 24/7 blog. Now the only mention of sports is when somebody like Victor Fiorillo or Ernest Owens complains.
Kevin has been writing about Philadelphia sports since 2009. He spent seven years in the CBS 3 sports department and started with the Union during the team's 2010 inaugural season. He went to the academic powerhouses of Boyertown High School and West Virginia University. email - k.kinkead@sportradar.com