<i>Newsweek</i>/The Daily Beast Taps Baba Shetty as New CEO

Baba Shetty has been named the new CEO of Newsweek/The Daily Beast. Shetty comes to the company from the ad agency Hill Holliday. He had been at Hill Holliday since 2006, most recently serving as its chief strategy officer. "Baba is a real catalyst in bringing ideas to the marketplace," said Tina Brown, in a memo announcing the hire. "We collaborated on our very successful Mad Men issue together and forged a terrific creative relationship in the process. He is extremely gifted at brand and digital strategy, and is the perfect partner for the next phase of The Newsweek Daily Beast Company and our expanding live events business." Stephen Colvin, CEO of Newsweek/The Daily Beast since 2011, is leaving the company in October. He will be joining Lerer Ventures, a venture capital firm, as an executive-in-residence. Unike Colvin — who reported to Barry Diller — Shetty will be reporting to Brown. Read the full memo from Brown after the jump. Dear NewsBeasters, I am very excited to share with you the appointment of Baba Shetty as CEO of The Newsweek Daily Beast Company. Baba is joining us from his position as Chief Strategy and Chief Media Officer at the firm Hill Holliday where he leads brand planning, consumer research, content and media planning. Baba is a real catalyst in bringing ideas to the marketplace. We collaborated on our very successful Mad Men issue together and forged a terrific creative relationship in the process. He is extremely gifted at brand and digital strategy, and is the perfect partner for the next phase of The Newsweek Daily Beast Company and our expanding live events business. Under his leadership, Hill Holliday was named 2011 Media Agency of the Year by Media magazine and for four consecutive years has won Adweek’s Media Plan of the Year Award – the only agency to do so. Prior to Hill Holliday, Baba led digital at Fallon Worldwide, and spent three years as a principal analyst at Forrester Research in Cambridge, MA. Baba assumes the role of CEO from Stephen Colvin. As you all know well, Steve has been a key force in building The Daily Beast from a start-up when he joined in 2009 to the hit it is today. Steve will depart in October. We have had a great 3 years together and all of us appreciate how hard he has worked. He leaves the company in a great place and poised for a very exciting future. Our Webby-award winning Daily Beast just celebrated a year-on-year increase in traffic of 69% to 15 million uniques a month, an ad-volume jump of 40% since the same time last year and we’ve seen an increase in Newsweek tablet subscriptions of 233% since January! Please join me in welcoming Baba and wishing Steve well – Tina

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Newsweek/The Daily Beast Taps Baba Shetty as New CEO

Chris O'Shea

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