Hearst Hires Troy Young as Digital Media Chief

Hearst Hires Digital Chief To Oversee Web Brands

Hearst Magazines, the publisher of such venerable titles as Esquire and Cosmopolitan, said on Wednesday that it was creating a new position, president of digital media.

Troy Young

The job will go to Troy Young, 45, who will be responsible for content, revenue production and development strategies for Hearst Magazines’ 26 online properties, which include Cosmopolitan.com, Elle.com and RealBeauty.com. The job’s purview extends only to magazines’ online brands, not to their print editions.

Mr. Young has not been employed in traditional media since the 1990s, when he worked for Canadian television. He has spent the last 20 years of his career in what is known as the “pure play” digital-only space.

Mr. Young comes most recently from Say Media, an integrated digital media company that builds its own online brands around themes (like ReadWrite, a technology Web site) or charismatic editors (like xoJane, edited by Jane Pratt, the founding editor of Sassy magazine) and then helps advertisers build branded content for those properties.

Before his time at Say, Mr. Young was chief experience officer of the Omnicom digital agency Organic, with clients such as American Express, Virgin Mobile and Chrysler.

David Carey, president of Hearst Magazines, said he chose Mr. Young because “Pure plays are increasingly the companies to watch in terms of how quickly they produce product, the orthodoxies they set aside and how they assemble their talent.”

“We want the pulse of a pure play,” he added.

Mr. Young said he had always worked “at the intersection of strategy and content,” which was particularly useful for what he described as a coming era where advertiser content would blend “seamlessly” with editorial content.

“We are seeing an integration of the advertisers and the content in native advertising,” he said, “and this is not going away.”

A version of this article appeared in print on May 9, 2013, on page B6 of the New York edition with the headline: Hearst Hires Digital Chief To Oversee Web Brands.