Zander Lurie, one of the executives who joined Guggenheim Digital Media last year to help the new company kick off an acquisition spree, has left.
Digital Dealmaker Zander Lurie Leaves Guggenheim
Ross Levinsohn’s No. 2 stayed less than a year.
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Peter Kafka covered media and technology, and their intersection, at Vox. Many of his stories can be found in his Kafka on Media newsletter, and he also hosts the Recode Media podcast.
Lurie, formerly a top executive at CBS, joined Guggenheim last February, recruited by Ross Levinsohn, who had joined the company a month earlier.
Lurie hasn’t announced a new job. “Ross is a star — I wish him and the folks at Guggenheim great success,” he wrote via email when asked for comment. A Guggenheim rep declined to comment.
Guggenheim Digital Media is an offshoot of management fund Guggenheim Partners, which says it has more than $160 billion in assets. When Levinsohn and Lurie went to work for Guggenheim last year, the plan was to take Guggenheim’s existing stable of trade magazines, including Billboard, Adweek and the Hollywood Reporter, and use them to kickstart a much larger media business.
The two men had planned on buying a big digital media property to anchor the new venture. But efforts to buy Hulu, the digital video hub, fell through when owners Disney and 21st Century Fox* decided last summer not to sell the site. The two men have also pursued Vevo, the “Hulu for Music Video” site owned in part by Sony, Universal Music and Google.
Last week Guggenheim shuffled its management structure and removed its magazines from Levinsohn’s control. He remains CEO of GDM, and the company has said he will “continue to pursue promising media opportunities in the digital space.”
* Cable giant Comcast also owns a stake in Hulu via its NBCUniversal arm, but doesn’t have management rights. NBCUniversal is an investor in Revere Digital, which owns this website.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
