Next Issue Media Hires Morgan Guenther as CEO

Next Issue Media, the e-reader-focused joint venture among media giants Conde Nast, Hearst, Meredith Corp., News Corp., and Time Inc., has ended a months-long search for a CEO by naming Morgan Guenther to the project’s top spot, effective immediately.

At Next Issue, Guenther will be charged with developing open standards for software to optimize the consumer experience on mobile devices. Before today’s announcement, Time Inc.’s John Squires had been serving as interim head of the venture. Guenther comes from the CEO spot at AirPlay, which among other things worked to bring video-game entertainment to mobile phones. Before that, he was president of TiVo from 2001 to 2003.

“Next Issue Media is well positioned to create and deliver incremental business opportunities to the magazine and newspaper publishing world,” said Mr. Guenther in a statement. “The potential for value creation across the entire industry ecosystem — including consumers, advertisers, publishers and distributors — is massive. Our task now is to execute on that potential, and I’m excited to be leading the charge here.”

Guenther’s appointment comes at an opportune time. Just last week, Rafat Ali of paidContent began to wonder whether the $10 million joint venture was losing steam, and whether the exhaustive CEO search had burned enough candidates to undermine the goal of filling the top spot. In the period between the venture’s launch and Guenther’s hire, the iPad launch came and went, making Next Issue’s search for top-down direction all the more crucial.

With Guenther’s hire, Next Issue has taken an important step toward actualizing its effort to “develop open standards for a new digital storefront and related technology to allow consumers to easily download and enjoy their favorite media content on a variety of digital devices.” It’s still unclear, though, how the venture will crack into Apple’s stranglehold on iPad software distribution. Fortunately for the five publishers behind it, Next Issue benefits from a constant influx of technological change (another device will, eventually, trump the iPad). With someone in charge, the venture is now all the more prepared to take advantage.

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