MTV tapped Richard Turley, the creative director of Bloomberg Businessweek, to be its first senior vice president of visual storytelling and deputy editorial director.
Turley, who arrived shortly after the magazine was purchased from McGraw-Hill in early 2010, is considered a key architect of a redesign that produced a string of cutting-edge and award-winning covers.
He bid farewell with a lengthy and humorous posting on Tumblr, in which he acknowledged it was not an easy decision.
“Four years ago, almost to the day, the redesigned Bloomberg Businessweek arrived on newsstands. The distance from that point to this seems to have passed within the blink of an eye and has been one of the most unexpected adventures I’ve ever had,” he wrote.
At MTV, he will be charged with “injecting vibrant and captivating visuals that illuminate real-time news, events and trending topics into the network’s on-air and digital platforms all day, every day.”
Stephen Friedman, MTV president, said, “Our audience speaks in a hybrid language of text and images, where the right photo or visual is as vital to communication as words…. He has a rare gift for creating an entire narrative in a single image.”
At Bloomberg Businessweek, Justin Smith, chief of Bloomberg Media Group, and BBW Editor Josh Tyrangiel will be looking for a successor to Turley.
When the company lost its chief content officer, Norm Pearlstine, to Time Inc. earlier this year, Tyrangiel was given an expanded role that included looking at the company’s TV operations while keeping a hand at BBW.
“It is possible that Richard, in losing his day-to-day partner [Tyrangiel] found it less interesting to be there,” said one industry observer.
Sources said that Bloomberg did try to counter the MTV offer.
In his farewell Tumblr post, Turley said the challenge to do something different beckoned.
“So why am I leaving?” he asked. “Well after writing all this, I’m wondering the same thing … but it’s time for me to learn something new and work with different content for a different audience … So farewell. Goodbye. So long. Bye. See you later. I am going now. Yeah, nearly there. Definitely going now. I’m off. See ya. Yup. I’m going. Haven’t quite left yet. Walking out. Now. Bye. Actually, I’m around till Thursday. Just want to draw this out a big longer. OK. That’s it.”