Keith J. Kelly

Keith J. Kelly

Media

Ex-Daily Beast chief lands gig at digital magazine

Rob Gregory, the former president of Tina Brown’s Newsweek Daily Beast, has become one of the first of the displaced to land a new gig.

Newsweek was formally handed off to a new owner in August — a move that came with staff downsizings.

Gregory is becoming the chief revenue officer of WhoSay, a digital magazine that was co-founded by Hollywood talent agency CAA and Steve Ellis. It recently landed the Chinese Internet behemoth Tencent Holdings as a minority investor to go along with Greylock Partners, which were early backers of Facebook and LinkedIn.

In total, Ellis and CAA secured $19.2 million in backing from a host of primary investors, including Amazon, Greylock and Comcast Ventures.

More recently it added Tencent Holdings, the publicly-traded firm that recently passed a $100 billion valuation, and New York City-based High Peaks Venture Partners, to its investor pool.

UK-born Ellis graduated from The Wharton School of business, but then spent the next decade trying to make it as a musician. He once boasted that he “spent the better part of the next decade as the lowest-earning graduate in the history of the business school.”

Things turned around considerably after he founded Pump Audio and sold it to Getty Images for $42.5 million in 2009.

Shortly thereafter, he said he was approached by CAA about forming a digital magazine that lets celebrities send their own material directly to fans.

Three weeks ago the company launched its website and a free app on Apple’s Newsstand.

For the past few years, Ellis said the company has been busy pitching the idea to talent and that he now has about 1,500 celebrities, including actors, athletes and musicians. Among those who have signed on are Tom Hanks, Eva Longoria, Channing Tatum, Novak Djokovic, Rory McIlroy, and Steven Tyler.

The hiring of Gregory, said Ellis, is intended to start monetizing the site’s celebrity-supplied material with advertising support. The stars are given a cut of the revenue, which taps in on the mobile world that seems to dominate ad agencies thought process these days.

“There’s still a role for celebrity weeklies and Twitter and Facebook,” said Gregory. “But this gives the celebrities a way to control their brand image and have a direct relationship with their fan base.”

Gregory has roamed both the digital and print worlds in his media career.

His last day at Newsweek Daily Beast was Oct. 11 and he was among the executives who left in the wake of the decision of IAC/InterActiveCorp to sell the digital edition of Newsweek to IBT Media.

Before that, he spent time at the ill-fated Plum TV network, a lifestyle cable TV and digital media company, which had big-name backers but was forced into bankruptcy as the Great Recession savaged media start ups.

Earlier, he had worked the print world as the group publisher of Maxim and publisher of Rolling Stone and Men’s Journal. He starts the new gig on Monday.