Three top executives are out at ALM Media in what the company is describing as a change to its organizational structure.
Chief marketing officer Carol Eversen, media division president Jay Kirsch and intelligence division president Andrew Neblett—all of whom joined ALM in 2016, around the time of its last major restructuring—have departed the company, CEO Bill Carter confirmed to Folio: on Wednesday.
This week’s shakeup at the B2B media and intelligence company, which primarily serves the legal industry, was driven by a reorganization of two of its key business units, according to Carter: from “media” and “intelligence”—born from the prior restructuring, implemented in 2016—to “information services” and “marketing solutions” (the third unit, events, will remain relatively unchanged).
“To really accelerate our growth, we need new products,” explains Carter. “Under the old structure, information services was split between media and intelligence. We needed to bring those together.”
Specifically, Carter cites the growth of Legal Compass—a two-year-old enterprise subscription product that the company says is used by more than half of the 200 largest law firms in the country—and the need to better integrate it with Law.com, the centralized domain that aggregates content from ALM’s nearly two-dozen legal publications, including The American Lawyer, The National Law Journal and The New York Law Journal, among others.
“That was pretty hard to make happen under two different divisions,” Carter adds, noting that, in the past three years, subscription products like Legal Compass have risen to account for half of the company’s overall revenues.
The other major change, Carter says, involves integrating sales and marketing within each of the business units. Previously, these functions had operated outside of the three main pillars, in order to sell and market across all of them. Carter says this change is being made “to focus on our growth areas and streamline decision-making,” essentially eliminating the need for a company-wide CMO.
Going forward, Mark Fried—who joined the company last year—will continue running the events division while also serving as CFO; Matthew Weiner, formerly chief sales officer, marketing solutions, will take on the new title of president of marketing services; and an outside hire who will run the information services (formerly media) division is expected to be announced later this month, with Carter overseeing that aspect of the business in the interim.
Eversen, Kirsch and Neblett aren’t the only executives to exit ALM in recent weeks; VP of technology Gene Bishop left in May after more than 12 years with the company to take on the role of global CIO at IDG Communications. Similarly, senior VP and general counsel Dana Rosen is leaving the company after more than four years to take on a yet-unspecified new role elsewhere. Those two moves, according to Carter, are unrelated to this week’s restructuring.
Based in New York, ALM is owned by private equity firm EagleTree Capital (formerly Wasserstein Partners), which also owns the Secaucus, N.J.-based B2B media company Northstar Travel Group.
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