David Eun, the president of AOL Media, is leaving the company, AOL chief Tim Armstrong announced on Thursday.
The move comes less than a month after AOL's $315 million acquisition of the Huffington Post, and ahead of the deal's closing.
"David and I discussed different roles for him in the new organization," Armstrong wrote in a memo to employees, "but came to the conclusion that there wasn’t a fit for what he is looking for at this point in his career."
Eun, a former Google executive, was hired by AOL a year ago, and was pivotal in Armstrong's original content push. Last June, Eun told Ad Age that AOL's plan was to "be the largest net hirer of journalists in the world" in 2011.
Armstrong announced several other post-merger personnel changes, too. Jon Brod, the president of AOL Ventures, will take on the additional role of COO of the Huffington Post Media Group once the deal is finalized. Brod will report to Arianna Huffington.
"Arianna’s vision is clear," Armstrong wrote. "Create real-time engagement and enlightenment for our millions of users, while continuing to build a comprehensive source of compelling news, entertainment, information, and opinion. Arianna will drive the content and production cycles for all editorial functions with all editorial staff reporting up through her."
Here's Armstrong's lengthy memo (via ATD) in full:
AOLers –
AOL is going to take some important steps this week to strengthen the comeback and our investment in the future of the content business and our best-in-class brands across the globe. We want to inform, entertain, connect, and help people — on a local and global scale.
We continue to put significant bets behind our strategy of high quality content and advertising at scale - on AOL properties and our growing network of publishing partners. We have improved our content properties organically, acquired leading properties with incredible talent, and partnered with some of the most creative people and brands in our industry. The world needs great content, video, and journalism and we will continue to grow our investment in brands and talent.
The Huffington Post and the AOL integration teams have been hard at work collaborating on eight separate work streams that contain over a thousand items that need to be integrated. Having done significant deals on the Internet in the past, it is clear that the combination of teams and brands will create significant value in many ways and the integration will move quickly once the deal is closed. We have focused our time and energy on the 80/80/80 model and The Huffington Post will accelerate our ability to serve women, local, and influencers in a more meaningful way on our properties and allow us to also focus on our growing network business.
As we do with important topics, we have an employees-first announcement on the organizational design we will be implementing after The Huffington Post deal is closed.
