Feb 3, 2006 11:17 AM
278
Enter your username and password.
San Francisco, 5:07 AM
Wed Feb 10
56 posts in the last 24 hours
So, please, let's just stipulate, already: Lloyd Braun is out of Yahoo. The rumors of his departure have been around so long that everyone's bored of them; we're promoting them to the status of fact.
To recap, Braun was brought in by CEO Terry Semel to take Yahoo into media. Funny, I thought Yahoo already was in media. But, by media, they meant real media: original, expensive, and with minimal impact on traffic. And Lloyd Braun, former head of programming at ABC, was just the man to do it. (Actually, that isn't quite fair: ABC did launch Lost and Desperate Housewives during his tenure.)
Braun spent lots of money on a fancy new campus in Santa Monica for Yahoo, swanned around Hollywood talking content deals with his movie industry buddies, converted a conference room with a patio into his office and reserved a parking space close to the elevators for his car. Those frumpy Yahoo geeks then reported him to the press for Hollywood behavior.
Braun has been on his way out for the last six months. During the last earnings call, Yahoo's CFO hardly bothered to pretend. Braun had assembled a great team, she said, for which, read: he's so out of here. Chris McGurk, another acquaintance of Semel from Hollywood and COO of MGM, the studio, is tipped for the job. Sure, a change like this is as complicated as a chain of sales in the real estate market, and Semel wants to allow Braun a graceful exit to Paramount. But hurry up already: this is slow torture.
Contact information for this author is not available.
Original material is licensed under a Creative Commons License permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution.
Start a new discussion