Guardian Media Group’s recent restructure is ongoing. The multimedia group is making redundant the managing director role of its main Guardian News & Media division.
Instead, GMG says “commercial members of the GNM executive committee will report directly to GMG chief executive officer Andrew Miller”. It means Tim Brooks, who became MD in 2006 from IPC Ignite, will leave on March 31.
New CEO Miller has been making changes so that GNM is more closely run out of GMG. In November, he merged GNMs’ two main governance bodies – an executive committee and a board – in to just one executive committee, chaired by himself.
“It has become clear that the most effective way to manage the commercial operations of GNM is to have a single point of leadership,” Miller told staff.
Among other recent changes, the head of GNM’s developer network moved up to be GMG’s digital strategy director. Under Brooks, GNM undertook significant staff cuts in the last two years.
For the uninitiated – GMG is charged by its owner Scott Trust to “preserve the financial and editorial independence of the Guardian in perpetuity”. That means Guardian News & Media is its eponymous main division, though GMG also operates GMG Radio, GMG Property Services and, as joint ventures with Apax, two big B2B holdings in Emap and Trader Media Group.
Everything bar GNM is now being classed an “investment“, as GMG’s recently-redesigned website indicates – suggesting a sale for those properties, which was always the intention for the B2B companies, is now higher on the CEO’s agenda.
The effect, at some point in the future, would be to leave GMG focusing mostly or solely on its main Guardian News & Media activities, financed with a windfall from the sales and from large-scale digital business model The Guardian is searching toward for the supposed post-print world.
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