Thursday, January 19, 2012

USAT | Ka-ching: Add executives No. 24 and 25

You can't swing a dead cat these days without hitting another new senior executive on board at USA Today. Many of them are at the burgeoning Sports Media Group, where I've just uncovered two more.

John Von Stade is vice president for properties. And Merrill Squires is senior vice president for sports marketing and partnerships. Both apparently joined the paper in the fall; their names don't appear on USAT's list of press releases for those months.

For those of you keeping track, they bring to at least 25 the number of executives hired or promoted to the level of general manager or up since Publisher Dave Hunke launched an overhaul of the newspaper in August 2010.

For the full list, see this handy-dandy spreadsheet.

7 comments:

  1. I'm sure their titles are very important. Go get em playah. Bring in the quan.

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  2. Is Merrill related to Jim and Tom Squires?

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  3. I think you need to cut Beusse's team sine slack. He is actually building a new business from scratch. He is hiring many people and only a handful make your list. This is a guy who has his act together. Two major business announcements from his group coming soon.

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  4. USAT management, particularly in the last few years, is the definition of insanity. Keep trying the same things over and over and expecting different results. Sure, titles change and even faces change occasionally, but through all of the musical chair games, we still retain some awful people while having watched countless talented employees leave or be shoved out. There is an institutional unwillingness to deal with real problems in a real, honest and effective manner here. That probably has existed in some form for more than a few years. But in recent times, this insanity is only weakening the product and the morale at a record clip.

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  5. Will someone explain what all these people do? Anyone? I dont get it.

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  6. There will be a vice president of explanatory job titles shortly. Stay tines for Usat U seminars to walk you through what every supposedly does.

    By the way, if you have ideas for more management roles, feel free to share.

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  7. Vice President of Diagonals.

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