Josh Quittner, one of the pi oneering digital journalists at Time Inc., is shoving off to do what he has been writing about for most of the past two decades — joining an Internet start-up.
Quittner, a 15-year veteran of the nation’s largest publisher, said he is leaving to join Flipboard, a small Palo Alto-based start-up as its editorial director.
“I’ll start after the July 4th holiday,” he told Media Ink. “I want to give [Time Inc. editor-in-chief] John Huey time to take me out for a really good party.”
Quittner, joined Time magazine in 1995 from Newsday to write about what was then the fledgling Internet. In April 2002, he was dispatched to San Francisco as editor of its new media magazine, Business 2.0, which folded in 2007.
From there he was one of the Business 2.0 survivors to land at Fortune.
Most recently, the 54-year-old Manhattan native served as director of digital editorial development for the news, sports and business magazines.
He had been one of the players involved in the sometimes tedious negotiations with Apple, Next Issue Media and various Android platforms developing tablet editions of Time Inc. titles.
Quittner said the decision was voluntary.
“I’m not getting severance, since I wasn’t fired. I tried wearing disheveled clothes for a while, but that didn’t get me fired.”
Said Huey in his farewell e-mail, “As much as we’ll miss Josh and his colorful personality in both the News and Sports Group, we shouldn’t miss a beat digitally: Terry McDonnell continues to lead digital innovations on all formats at Sports Illustrated while Jim Fredereci, Dan Roth, Chris Peacock and of course John Cantarella are launching new apps and ideas on a regular basis at the News Group.”
No direct replacement is being named for Quittner.
He is the second major digital player to leave in recent months.
Randall Rothenberg, who had been hired as the company’s chief digital officer during the five-month run of CEO Jack Griffin, left in February; he returned to become the head of the Interactive Advertising Bureau when Griffin was ousted.
Food boss
Condé Nast is finally moving all of its food-related digital properties under one person.
Beth-Ann Eason was appointed senior vice president and general manager, overseeing Epicurious.com and the resurrection project Gourmet Live, which emerged from the defunct foodie title that folded in 2009.
For good measure she also gets dominion over Brides.com.
Eason had been general manager and chief operating officer of Beliefnet. Prior to that she had worked on the digital side at Fox Digital, Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, Yahoo!, Ziff-Davis Media and DoubleClick.
The move seems to be something of a contrarian one for Condé Nast, which has been stripping many of its old magazine Web and digital operations out of the Condé Nast digital operation, once headed by Sarah Chubb, and handing them over to the individual magazines to operate.
Epicurious.com is an overarching food site that also includes Bon Appétit. The separation of Bon Appétit from the revived Gourmet Live site was said to have been one of the irritants that led to the departure of Bon Appétit Publisher Carol Smith last year.
Smith, a former publishing director at Elle, recently rejoined the fashion world as publisher of Hearst-owned Harper’s Bazaar.
2015 move
Condé Nast put to rest some of the early mis-reporting surrounding its move to 1 World Trade Center at the signing ceremony of the $1.9 billion lease.
Some outlets had said that Condé was moving in as early as 2013 and that up to 5,000 employees would be moving into the site.
At the press conference for the contract signing, Condé Nast Chairman S.I. Newhouse, Jr. was front and center, but it was left to Chief Operating Officer John Bellando to clarify the facts.
He said he thought the move in date would be “fourth quarter of 2014 to first quarter of 2015.”
Most insiders expect it will be 2015 before everyone is safely set tled in their new hi-tech, green open office seating quarters.
Also reports in the New York Times and elsewhere said 5,000 would move into the 1-million-square foot office space.
The Post was going with the 3,000 figure. “I think you’d be better off going with the 3,000 plus figure,” Bellando said. kkelly@nypost.com