Reports Folio's Jason Fell:

I spoke with Spanfeller this afternoon and he denied reports that his leaving was pressured by Forbes investor Elevation Partners. "That's just crappy reporting," he said during a phone conversation. "Unless Elevation has the ability to stick thoughts and actions in my head, they had nothing to do with my decision to move on."

Spanfeller also denied reports that his departure had to do with declining traffic at Forbes.com. "That's even shittier reporting," he said. "Anyone with any tenure in the online space knows that different sources you go to for traffic numbers produce different results, and that's problematic at best. Even if one says we're down slightly over a couple of months, the truth is that Forbes.com is up from half a million uniques in 2001 to 18 million to 20 million today."

Spanfeller went on to say that he's launching a media firm that would manage publishers' websites at the end of the year.

Spanfeller to Take Equity Stake in Client Projects [Folio]

Jeff Bercovici of Daily Finance reports:

Spanfeller did not respond to messages, but his departure is thought by insiders to be a result of pressure by Elevation Partners, the private equity group that bought a large minority stake in Forbes three years ago. In May of this year, Elevation co-founder Roger McNamee resigned from the Forbes board and was replaced by Bret Pearlman, another Elevation Partners executive whose arrival was seen to herald a round of cost-cutting. Since then, rumors have circulated that Spanfeller's days were numbered, even though he is said to be favored by president/COO Tim Forbes.

Forbes CEO Steve Forbes announced the news in a memo to company employees tonight. In it he said:

Jim has done a monumental job of bringing Forbes.com to the lead position in business websites, and secured Forbes.com as the must visit site for not only global business leaders but also anyone interested in the finest business reporting and analysis available. At present Forbes.com has 18 million unique visitors a month.

Along the way, Jim has overseen the development and growth of Forbes Digital, which includes Forbes.com, ForbesTraveler.com, Investopedia.com, RealClearPolitics.com, RealClearMarkets.com, Real Clear Sports, and Forbes Business and Finance Blog Network, which together reach 40 million unique visitors a month.

This immense growth on the digital side of the business was spearheaded, pursed, and led by Jim with enormous success. The digital world is still uncharted with few rules, and Jim's intellect, creativity, and business acumen helped bring us our number one position. For this the Forbes family is very grateful and we wish him all the success in his future plans.

Nothing further is known at this time about who will replace Spanfeller or what his future plans are.

Sources Say Forbes.com CEO Stepping Down [Jeff Bercovici/Daily Finance]
Forbes CEO Jim Sapnfeller Out: Here's the Internal Memo [Peter Kafka/All Things D]

From: Steve Forbes
Sent: Mon 11/17/2008 2:20 PM
To: undisclosed-recipients
Subject: News

We want to let you know of a series of structural changes that will enable us not only to better weather the current economic torm, but to move ahead quickly and profitably when the global economies begin recovering. These moves will make our company highly competitive in an extremely tough environment.

One of the benefits of Forbes is precisely the ability to move nimbly and swiftly to respond to our clients and marketers in the way they want to do business. For these reasons we have decided to change the organization of our sales and marketing groups in the company. In making these decisions, we got enormous and valuable input from our own people, as well as the marketplace to best position Forbes Media.

Over the next few weeks, the sales and marketing groups of Forbes magazine and Forbes.com will be combined into three specific units under the Forbes Media umbrella. The purpose is to enable us to more sharply and effectively focus our resources and priorities in response to our audiences and marketing partners.

The first newly organized sales and marketing group is the Brand Intelligence Group. It will focus on the senior-most levels of our marketing partners. We will create consultative engagements with these executives to better connect our highly valuable audiences with our advertisers' core communication goals. This vital enterprise will be led by Kevin Gentzel, as President and Group Publisher of Forbes Media. Bruce Rogers, Chief Brand Officer, will lead the marketing and research arms of this effort. The Integrated Solutions Group, another newly aligned sales and marketing unit, will work to create integrated and custom solutions to access our unique audiences. These original programs will be cross-platform, content-based, with broad marketability. The Integrated Solutions Group will be led by Mike Woods, as President.

As always, the core of our client outreach will be our geographically dispersed sales teams. Now, though, we will organize these teams in regional business centers, that combine the talents of the Forbes and Forbes.com sales staff in the newly created Forbes Media Sales and Service Group. This initiative will position the Forbes brand as a true multi-media vehicle. The marketplace increasingly recognizes the necessity to utilize —precisely and efficiently — several platforms to achieve their objectives. The group will be led by Avery Stirratt and Robert Pietsch, who will serve as Co-Presidents and Chief Advertising Officers. Debbie Himmelfarb will serve as Vice President, Marketing to support this group's marketing programs.

The leaders of the newly established groups will report to The Office of the Chairman, which will consist of Steve Forbes, Chairman and CEO of Forbes Media; Timothy Forbes, President and COO of Forbes Media; and Jim Spanfeller, President and CEO of Forbes.com.

I want to thank the leadership of sales and marketing for their critical input in this valuable effort. We believe these bold moves will place us in a far stronger position to expand our historical lead in both print and on-line. In other areas of the company, the following changes will be implemented as well.

Conferences and events in the U.S. and Europe will now be part of sales and marketing programs.

Recently, the name of the overall brand of web properties and affiliated properties has changed to Forbes Digital. Included under the Forbes Digital umbrella are: Forbes.com; Investopedia.com; RealClearPolitics.com; RealClearMarkets.com; RealClearSports.com; the Forbes.com Business and Finance Blog Network; and ForbesTraveler.com. ForbesAutos.com will be discontinued.

We are also strengthening and expanding the editorial integration at both Forbes and Forbes.com. There has been a program to exchange talent between the web and the magazine in place for some time. These efforts have been successful, and we are in the midst of conversations to discuss ways to truly integrate the great talent in both organizations by sometime in early 2009.

How should I know? I work at Forbes. I'll be the last to know.

I'd heard rumors about .com getting a floor here, but rumors like that circulate all the time and never come true. If they did, we'd belong to Fox, the magazine and website would already have merged, we'd all be in one building Queens and Joe Nocera would be running the operation. I personally doubt Valleywag is well sourced here.

There are also rumors about Spanfeller making a power grab. But what else is knew? Those rumors have been around since he arrived. Sometimes they're true, sometimes not. Or perhaps sometimes he succeeds at getting more power and sometimes he doesn't.

I think the move might be true, and it might involve some shift in power, but the idea that there's a dramatic consolidation in the wind is almost certainly wrong. But that's just my opinion, your mileage may vary.

I do think putting the two staffs in the same building would do a lot to get print writers writing for the web and web writers writing for the magazine. But this is already happening. Maureen Farrell and Andy Greenberg both write for print, and Brian Caulfield had a cover. Nathan Vardi (print) did a list of the world's most wanted fugitives for the web. Mike Maiello just went from the magazine to the website.

If they do take over a floor of 60, I hope they bring their free coffee with them.

Literally, in the real-estate sense. In New York, Forbes is housed at 60 Fifth Avenue, while Forbes.com is at 90 Fifth Avenue. Now, the publisher is said to be taking a floor at 60 Fifth to house the dotcom reporters, while it clears out "deadwood long-timers." The new mandate: Everyone will write for both Web and print. Which sounds sensible — unless you work at Forbes.

What Forbes is not planning to announce: What sounds like a merger is really a takeover — by Forbes.com. Jim Spanfeller, the publisher of Forbes.com, will run the combined operation. "It's a massive coup, one that print people have long seen coming and long feared," says our tipster. As well they should: The editors of Forbes have long looked down on their Web brethren. Now they will be working for them.

Publishers are bad-mouthing ad networks, only to offer the smaller publishers who really need them their own networks instead. That's not cutting out the middleman to protect brands — that's steering away interlopers from outside the media business, while jealously guarding their relationships with Madison Avenue. Either way, smaller publishers which can't afford their own salespeople will get taken to the cleaners. It's just a question of who drives.