Condé Nast on Monday chose a web-focused executive from its ranks as the new publisher at Details — signalling it wants to jump start the title’s nascent digital efforts.
Drew Schutte, a former publisher of Wired and The New Yorker, who was most recently executive vice president and chief integration officer at publishing giant, replaces Kevin Martinez, who was lured to Maxim a month ago.
Maxim’s new owner, Biglari Holdings, is investing heavily and is rumored to have nearly doubled the salary of Martinez — a publishing veteran who worked at Hachette Filipacchi and Hearst before Condé Nast — to get him to jump ship in mid-July.
At Maxim, he is trying to rebuild the staff as investor Sardar Biglari invests heavily in paper stock and an oversized format. Maxim does not have a new editor-in-chief since Dan Bova walked out shortly after meeting the new owner and heading to a new digital start up where he teamed up with former Maxim president Ben Madden.
Martinez recently lured six Details ad sales side people and at least two others from other titles to follow him to Maxim, Women’s Wear Daily recently reported, but they appear to be lower level employees.
Back at Condé, Schutte will be tasked with filling out the staff, although the defections may enable him to fill with his own people.
Schutte is expected to try to lead a big digital push at the magazine, which had only 1,063,542 unique visitors to its web site in June, according to Media Industry Newsletter. That is down 17.3 percent from the month earlier period.
Page views at Details site also tumbled, falling 15 percent in June, to 7,614,353, according to MIN, compared to May.
On the ad page front, the magazine was performing on a par with the industry at large with its print pages down 5.7 percent to 365.8 pages through August.
Dan Peres is the long time editor-in-chief of the title.