New Salon CEO Says Mobile Apps to Come (Exclusive)
Salon named Cindy Jeffers as the new CEO and CTO of the online newsmagazine Wednesday.
The Huffington Post's former technical director, who joined Salon last month as CTO, said she plans to launch smartphone and tablet apps for the 17-year-old culture chronicle, which has long lagged behind its mobile-savvy competitors like Slate and The Daily Beast.
"We're going to be experimenting a lot with emerging platforms and new data sets," Jeffers told TheWrap. "It is something we're working toward."
She succeeded the site's founder David Talbot, who served a third stint as CEO for almost a year after former CEO Richard Gingras stepped down to become the head of Google's global news department.
Read also: David Talbot Returns as Salon's Interim CEO
Jeffers graduated from New York University with a master's degree in interactive telecommunications and started an eight-year career at a variety of technology research firms. While based at a company in northern Scotland, Jeffers worked on a project aimed at helping rural communities in Rwanda build data sets and legal information online through their mobile phones.
A year later, she was back in New York, overseeing technology at Arianna Huffington's blogging behemoth.
"I got really interested in working with communities," Jeffers told TheWrap. "I think that HuffPost has always done a great job at having a community and working very much with their readers to innovate it."
Jeffers sees herself as a techie-turned-newshound, a businesswoman who can write code in eight different programs.
"We've seen a shift in the last few years with technology companies really leading the way with journalism and finding journalism from the outside," she said.
Though her journalistic experience is limited to a news outlet known for its steady stream of aggregated stories, Jeffers said she will leave Salon's editorial department untouched and respect its new credo to publish less but produce more impactful, original stories.
In February, Editor-in-Chief Kerry Lauerman publicly recanted the publication's previous aggregation practice of writing what he described as short decoders to other journalists' in-depth news coverage. In a blog post, he said he was not proud of that approach, one he called "a mandate from above."
"I think that they have really proven to be strong as leaders in journalism in the last few years," Jeffers said of Salon's roster of reporters and editors.
She said she also plans to continuing growing Open Salon, a community blogging platform hosted on the site.
"Internally, we're thinking through how to take it to the next level," she said.
The website also hired Matthew Sussberg, another Huffington Post alumnus, to lead the advertising department.
"The evolution of the news industry is deeply intertwined with the evolution of advertising and marketing," communications director Liam O'Donoghue wrote in a blog post introducing the two new hires. "Nobody better understands how to achieve mutually beneficial results in both of these realms than Matthew."
Related Articles:
Salon Reaches Record Audience -- 7M Visitors and Counting
