Mr. Bennack, the 80-year-old chief executive of Hearst, used profits from titles like Cosmopolitan and Good Housekeeping to build the magazine and newspaper chain into a diversified company with investments in television, a ratings agency and health care information.
Steven R. Swartz, the company’s chief operating officer for the last two years and a former newspaperman, will succeed Mr. Bennack on June 1. Mr. Bennack told the 24-member Hearst board on Wednesday morning of his plans to retire.
The change comes as some of the nation’s largest magazine companies look to new leadership to migrate profitably from print to digital formats.
Time Warner, for example, announced this month that it planned to spin off its magazine division into a separate publishing company by the year’s end. That company will lose its second chief executive in recent years since the head of Time’s magazine division, Laura Lang, said she would leave once the creation of the new company was complete. Condé Nast announced this month that it promoted the editor of Vogue, Anna Wintour, to artistic director and gave her some of the responsibilities that the company’s chairman S. I. Newhouse had for the last three decades.
The news is especially significant at Hearst, which Mr. Bennack has led since 1979. In a recently published anniversary book called “Hearst One Hundred and Twenty Five,” Mr. Bennack reflected on how much the company had changed under his tenure as it moved into cable in 1981 and expanded into China in 1998, growing well beyond media assets, with major equity stakes in Fitch Group and recently expanding into health care information.
Hearst also has expanded far more into television by introducing cable networks with ABC, AE, History and Lifetime, by investing in ESPN and by partnering with the producer Mark Burnett. Hearst also vastly expanded its magazine portfolio by starting titles like O: the Oprah Magazine and HGTV Magazine along with purchasing more than 100 magazines from the French publisher Lagardère.
“The degree of change exceeds anything that I thought about,” said Mr. Bennack. “If you sat me down in 1979, it’s far different from what I could have described.”
Though Mr. Bennack has kept a relatively low profile at Hearst, he has been more of a public figure at Lincoln Center, where he served as chairman from 2005 to 2009 and currently is chairman emeritus. In his tenure as chairman, he worked with president Reynold Levy to raise nearly a billion dollars for an ambitious redevelopment project that has transformed the Lincoln Center campus. He did that by courting new donors and appealing to old ones with a straight-talking style tinged with his native Texas twang.
Mr. Bennack is also one of only two board chairman to have served at the Paley Center, which was formerly the Museum of Television and Broadcasting. The only other was William S. Paley, who built CBS and the person for whom the center is named.
Those chairmanships have been much more than figurehead positions. Mr. Bennack had to do the real work of getting Lincoln Center rebuilt and paid for. He oversaw the center’s construction project, and initiated work on the new Hearst Tower on Eighth Avenue and 57th Street in Manhattan.
Steven R. Swartz, 51, started out as a reporter at The Wall Street Journal and worked his way up to become Page One editor. He was founding editor of the magazine Smart Money, which was a joint venture run by Hearst and Dow Jones. In 2001, he joined Hearst’s newspaper division and worked his way up to run the group, which includes 15 newspapers like The Albany Times Union and The San Francisco Chronicle. He has been the company’s chief operating officer for the last two years. Mr. Swartz is also active at Lincoln Center, where he is chairman of the Lincoln Center fund and a board member.
“He has established himself as a visible and respected executive in media, advertising and the civic communities that are important to Hearst,” said Mr. Bennack. “He has fulfilled my expectations and those of the board.”
Mr. Swartz said that he planned to continue to diversify the company in all types of information and build on Hearst’s well-known brands.
“We think of ourselves as a media services and information company,” said Mr. Swartz. “We define ourselves more broadly. We’ve been in the information business since we got started.”
Mr. Bennack will remain on the board of directors and the executive committee of Hearst.
Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/28/business/media/frank-a-bennack-jr-to-step-down-as-ceo-at-hearst.html?partner=rss&emc=rss