Hearst president David Carey: ‘We’re a content company with a platform mentality’
He has been involved in the purchase of nearly 100 titles from France’s Lagardère, overseen the launches of new magazines with Dr. Oz, HGTV and The Food Network, and expects to introduce another one with a partner this year. But Hearst’s approach to magazine publishing is very different from what it used to be. Carey talked about why the old models are outmoded, how he’s bringing native ads to print, and why he sees Facebook as a friend to publishers.
Hearst is a 126-year-old company with roots in print publishing. How do you describe the company today?
We are a content company, operating with a platform mentality. We’re now functioning as one global entity as far as content sharing. It’s allowed us to use common ad experiences and take our brands across the world. In the same way Facebook makes it very easy to do large-scale deals with clients, we’re going to be able to do the same thing. We have very much a platform approach with Cosmo. We just launched Cosmopolitan Nigeria; yesterday we launched Cosmopolitan Norway. Our historic thinking would have been, having a team on the ground, resources. Cosmopolitan Nigeria is proof point of the strategy: We use a few local content producers, engineering talent that is US and UK-based; they use the same publishing architecture.
