Quincy Smith will serve as CEO and Neil Ashe will serve as president at CBS Interactive in the wake of the now-completed acquisition of CNET by CBS. And those are just the juicy meatballs atop a tangled mess of management noodles after executives from the two companies were tossed in the pot. News.com editor Dan…
How'd the CBS-CNET merger go down? Without much involvement from CBS Interactive head Quincy Smith, it turns out. Most of the negotiations with CNET CEO Neil Ashe went through Fredric Reynolds, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer of CBS. Occaisionally, CBS CEO Leslie Moonves stepped in to move…
Under the wing of CBS, CNET CEO Neil Ashe will continue to earn his $700,000 salary. He'll also get a 100 percent bonus and, in the next 10 days, a long-term stock award of "not less than $1,625,000 per year," according to a 8-K CNET filed with the SEC yesterday. CNET CFO Zander Lurie will get such a stock award…
CNET has been eyed by Quincy Smith, CBS's hyperacquisitive online chief, long before he sealed a $1.8 billion deal to buy the company. As a banker at Allen & Co., CNET was his client. "At one point, he wrote this major presentation about how valuable content was," a tipster tells us. "The single example in it was…
Myopic Wall Street often uses a microscope when it should use a telescope. The rot at Web publisher CNET goes far beyond the particulars of one quarter. Forget the question of by how many cents per share it missed earnings expectations, and ask yourself this: Why isn't CNET gushing cash? Its established brands in…
This made me LOL for real: In this post about the memo CNET CEO Neil Ashe sent out regarding CNETs recent layoffs, commenter random_play penned a beauty:
"That's life," commenter danmiller3 wrote after we told you about how CNET laid off an employee recovering from cancer. Turns out he was more right than he knew. A new CNET tipster tells that one of his laid-off colleagues lost his job just two months after his wife gave birth. "Fuck Neil Ashe," our source says. He…
CNET CEO Neil Ashe sent this all-hands memo to explain to his charges the changes that CNET is making to be successful. The memo looks like it came straight out of a Dilbert strip. Ashe says CNET must "embrace change" and "drive greater efficiencies in the business." In addition, a management task force has…
You may recall CNET Networks sold Webshots to American Greetings yesterday at the fire-sale price of $45 million. Well, it's not stopping there. In an effort to build the "media company of the future," CEO Neil Ashe said, "it is also important to sell some of our properties and we won't shy from it." Important in…
Reformed stock promoter Henry Blodget has a suggestion for CNET: Take it private, with the help of former CEO Shelby Bonnie. An excellent idea. From all we hear, morale couldn't be lower at the tech-news portal. And current CEO Neil Ashe isn't helping matters. His idea of a pep speech? "We should be more like Al…
CNET employees loved CEO Shelby Bonnie, according to the San Francisco Chronicle (and a CNETter confirms to me that there was loyalty since he'd been at the company since Day One). So it was a shock when he seemingly fired himself this week over overseeing improperly backdated stock options.
