CondéNet International, the global digital division of magazine giant CondéNast, is searching for a new president after news emerged (via NMA) that Stefano Maruzzi will leave the company by July. Italian Maruzzi joined the company from MSN in February 2007 and just overseen the launch of Wired magazine and Wired.com in Italy and—soon—in the UK, as he announced at last year’s AOP Summit. He is responsible for 58 websites in 12 countries—CondéNast’s entire digital output excluding the US. Another of Maruzzi’s achievements was to centralise CondéNast’s digital activities across its online titles through CondéNet’s management structure, ending the practice of magazines varying their publishing models from title to title.

Maruzzi said at that conference that a big part of his job was changing the mindset of the London-based company to one that understood and valued digital content; his plans were met with some opposition from those who saw him and his appointed staff as “digital barbarians”. He said (via PG): “Inside the company all the digital content was driven by editors. Nothing against editors, I am a journalist myself, but I thought we needed specialists. So we mixed the purists with the barbarians - I asked a lot of people to join the company to mix with the traditional Conde Nast culture.”