Tuesday, January 04, 2005

VNU Business gets editorial chief

VNU Business Media has named Sid Holt as editorial director. In the newly created position, Holt will be the chief strategist for 52 of the company's B2B titles. It's hard to say what Holt intends to do. I don't know him. He most recently served as executive vice president and editor in chief of VNU's Adweek, and I'm a fan of that product. He also oversaw the relaunch of Editor & Publisher, which marked a huge improvement.
At the top of my list of suggestions for Sid -- do something about the VNU websites! HollywoodReporter.com seems to crash nearly every time I visit it. Mediaweek seems unfocused, terribly understaffed, and operates on some sort of strange late-in-the-day deadline. Brandweek.com is so very uninteresting compared with Brandchannel, one of the prettiest sites on the Web.