Nothing against editors: Mixing the purists with the barbarians

"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."

--Stefano Maruzzi, president of CondeNet International, Conde Nast's digital division, in a story in U.K Press Gazette explaining how he brought technologically savvy staff in so that a culture that had been dominated by print magazines no longer was.

"We are in the middle of a huge, huge technological and organisational migration, we are changing a lot of staff… We used to think that we had a magazine - and then we had the website. I don't think this is right, it's not what the customer wants....

"The idea was to standardize as much as possible," he said. "Everything was driven by a pure editorial approach. I hired a lot of people…we changed so much of the culture within the organization that some people decided to leave, which was good because we could inject new blood into the organization."

Maruzzi joined Conde Nast International from Microsoft where he served as Director of Strategy and Content-International for MSN, Microsoft's consumer portal and before that country manager for MSN in Italy. Prior to joining Microsoft, from 1996 to 1999, Maruzzi worked for Mondadori, the largest magazine publisher in Italy where he was in charge of the book division, Mondadori Infomatica. Maruzzi was also the editor of PCWeek in Italy.