Did Yahoo approach Freston for CEO job?

Usual caveats apply: this is second-hand information, from a single source, and it hasn't been checked. Word is Tom Freston, former CEO of MTV Networks and, later, parent company Viacom, was sounded out about the CEO job at Yahoo. According to the account, the appointment would have left Terry Semel, current Yahoo boss, with a titular role.

Freston as CEO of Yahoo is of course an insane idea, in the bad way. The last thing that the internet company needs is another entertainment industry veteran, after Terry Semel's reign. Freston built his career on the growth of the MTV music network, and lavish pay for creative talent; the challenge for Yahoo is a response to the dominance of Google in search engines and Myspace in personal publishing, and it would be useful for the CEO to have some feel for user behavior on the internet. Different.

Nor would Freston be the man to take Yahoo through a grand merger. One of the criticisms of his tenure at media giant Viacom: that he allowed Rupert Murdoch of News Corporation to snatch Myspace. As for Freston himself: he's tied, personally, to New York, and can have no desire to run a public media company like the one, Viacom, from which he was rather brutally fired. Freston's more likely to set up his own fund to invest in new media ventures, like everyone else these days.

On the other hand, the rumor does probably affect the odds on Terry Semel's departure. Until recently, despite Yahoo's lagging stock price and reputation, the conventional wisdom was that Terry Semel would go out on a high note, after the acquisition of student networking site Facebook, for instance, or a merger with AOL or MSN, two of Google's other rivals. If there is some kind of CEO search underway, even if informal, that suggests he may not have time for an elegant exit.

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