Fortune publisher gets a promotion

Todd Larsen, the former Dow Jones & Co. president who now oversees Time’s magazine division, sent out the following announcement on Wednesday:

In order to best organize ourselves for success in the future, I believe we must find ways to work more strongly across our titles and across the company.  The collective strength of our portfolio can be more powerful than any one brand, especially in the digital arena where we need to focus for much of our growth.

To move us toward those objectives, I’m delighted to let you know that I am naming Jed Hartman Group Publisher of News and Business, effective immediately.

In this newly-created position reporting to me, Jed will be responsible for all ad sales and marketing for TIME, TIME.com, FORTUNE, FORTUNE.com, Money and CNNMoney.com, allowing him to harness the collective power of these tremendous brands to provide smart, creative and scalable solutions for our advertising partners across every print and digital platform.

Jed is uniquely qualified for this role. In his current position as the Worldwide Publisher of FORTUNE and CNNMoney he has overseen the last two years of consecutive advertising growth at FORTUNE, expanded its booming conference business– which he will continue to manage and grow– by bringing in record sponsorship dollars, and has played a major role in taking CNNMoney international and launching its mobile products.  He was the driving force of FORTUNE’s new iPad app, the first newsstand app to seamlessly integrate print and digital content, which has consistently been at the top of the “Business and Investing” category since it launched two weeks ago. Also, Jed is no stranger to the news business, having had a very successful run as Publisher of The Week for three years before returning to Time Inc. He will undoubtedly help us optimize the tremendous power of the TIME brand domestically and internationally.

Jed will have a senior ad sales executive at each title reporting to him; they will help him in this cross-title effort and will also continue to develop brand-specific programs for advertisers.  The first appointment to the newly-created role of Vice President, Sales for FORTUNE is Brendan Ripp.  Brendan has been a key performer across News and Business Group titles and he is a leader in the financial category.  This new role will be a perfect fit for both Brendan and FORTUNE at a time the franchise has strong momentum.  The plans for the lead sales executives for TIME and Money will be forthcoming.  In the meantime, Brendan will keep a hand on Money and Jed will work with both teams in detail.  In the coming days Jed will also aim to best align the marketing and events teams in the group to work across this new structure and to maximize their effectiveness at creating cross brand and multi-media programs.  International will continue to be organized as it has been, with Andrew Butcher and Andy Bush both reporting to Jed with their cross-title hats on.

Jed’s appointment, and putting this new structure in place, are the first steps in taking our news and business titles to their best position for long-term growth.  Each of our core brands is reaching more consumers than ever before on multiple platforms and we will be focusing on developing new digital products and approaches to increase those audiences exponentially.  I look forward to working with all of you on these exciting efforts.