Owen Van Natta (pictured left), who was hired as CEO of MySpace less than a year ago, is stepping down — and the lieutenants with whom he was paired are taking over.
Mike Jones and Jason Hirschhorn (lower right, left to right), installed beneath Van Natta last April, are being elevated to co-presidents, News Corp. announced Wednesday.
Apparently, the arranged marriage of styles — the polished, even-handed Van Natta, the hard-charging Jones and the brash and jocular Hirschhorn — wasn’t going too smoothly.
A Fox executive who spoke on condition of anonymity said that frustration was building over the slow pace of change, and this led to clashes between Van Natta — who was hired by News Corp. digital chief Jon Miller — and Jones and Hirschhorn.
Miller conducted an all day review of MySpace with his three lieutenants and at the end of the day, fired Van Natta, according to Kara Swisher at AllThingsD.
Though MySpace had recently stanched the loss of users under Van Natta’s stewardship, the soon-to-be co-presidents Jones and Hirschhorn were itching to charge ahead.
Van Natta told TechCrunch just a few days ago that he had spent the past eight months refocusing the company on its content-sharing platforms, making the once-powerful social media tool into a place to share music, video and TV clips.
But he gave no indication that he was on the outs:
"Once you have a product strategy, you have to make sure you have the right team," he said in the interview, late last month. "We’ve built an entirely new management team at MySpace, and I’m really excited about some of the talent that we’ve brought onboard … now that talent’s starting to be bulit throughout the entire company."
But his task of turning around the fortunes of MySpace — which continues to founder while Facebook and Twitter roar ahead –wasn’t moving ahead as quickly as News Corp. brass had hoped, as CEO Rupert Murdoch hinted at during a conference call with investors last week.
Van Natta joined MySpace last April, at the same time as Jones and Hirschhorn, who at the time were installed at the time as chief operating officer and chief product officer, respectively. He’s also been at Amazon and Facebook, where he made his bones at a variety of jobs while the dominant social-networking tool was in its infancy.
With this move, Van Natta is gaining a reputation as a short-timer: Before taking the job at MySpace, he ran Project Playlist, a music startup, for less than six months.
The complete text of the release here:
Los Angeles, CA, February 10, 2010 – News Corporation today announced that Owen Van Natta will step down from his position as MySpace CEO, effective immediately. Mr. Van Natta will be replaced by newly-elevated co-Presidents Mike Jones and Jason Hirschhorn, who will each report to Jon Miller, Chairman and CEO of Digital Media for News Corporation. All three executives joined MySpace in April 2009, with Mr. Jones and Mr. Hirschhorn previously serving as Chief Operating Officer and Chief Product Officer, respectively.
