Glenn Beck viewers are trying to understand the new Glenn Beck, who sucks, By November 2015—according to figures from the Web traffic measuring service
Quantcast—monthly traffic for TheBlaze.com had dropped to 16.4 million unique
visitors from 29 million, and traffic for the associated web site GlennBeck.com, had plunged
from 4.4 million to 1.4 million uniques. Glenn Beck has lost his way and his viewers and listeners don't have the time to save him as they're saving the United States from Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. The new Glenn Beck radio show is a shill operation for Ted Cruz, what's the deal, nobody knows.
In what knowledgeable observers say is a sign of
increasing turmoil in Glenn Beck’s troubled media empire, Beck’s longtime
mentor and corporate executive, Kraig Kitchin, has quit as CEO of The Blaze.
Kitchin’s replacement, Stewart Padveen, a digital
startup entrepreneur who joined Beck’s company last summer, will be the fourth
leader of The Blaze since late 2014.
Kitchin, 54, who took over operations of Beck’s
conservative-leaning subscription digital and cable television enterprise last
June—after two previous CEOs abruptly left in the space of six months—is
resigning along with two other senior executives: Jeremy Price, director of
advertising sales, and Liz Julis, director of marketing…. Several other key
employees, including at least two senior producers based in The Blaze’s
shrinking New York operation, are expected to follow them out the door.
A source close to the situation predicted a “mass exodus”
from the New York studios, which are housed in a largely unoccupied 35,000
square-foot space at Midtown Manhattan’s Bryant Park, previously rented by
Yahoo, under a 10-year lease costing Beck’s privately held company an estimated
$2 million a year.
But according to multiple sources, Kitchin’s
announcement comes out of frustration after continual friction with top Beck
executive Jonathan Schreiber, the recently named president of Beck’s
14-year-old production company, Mercury Radio Arts.
According to multiple sources, Kitchin—who commuted
from his home in Los Angeles to Dallas and New York—took the CEO job on an
interim basis with the condition that Schreiber would agree not to interfere in
The Blaze, an agreement that Kitchin realized was continually being breached.
According to people familiar with the situation, Schreiber’s alleged meddling
in Kitchin’s operation ultimately became intolerable.
Schreiber’s alleged intrusion is said to have also
figured in the departure in June of then-Blaze chief executive Betsy Morgan, an
experienced digital media executive who previously ran CBS News’s digital
operations, helped grow The Huffington Post, and built TheBlaze.com into a news
and aggregation site that–in November 2014– attracted 29 million unique
visitors per month.
But by November 2015—according to figures from the
Web traffic measuring service Quantcast—monthly traffic for TheBlaze.com had
dropped to 16.4 million unique visitors, and traffic for the associated web
site GlennBeck.com, had plunged from 4.4 million to 1.4 million uniques.
Besides a period of staff layoffs and turnover that
continues to this day, and despite claims of profitability, that “history”
apparently includes taking on more debt than the company’s principal owner was
comfortable with.
At a staff meeting in New York last February, Beck
exhorted his employees to pinch pennies and said the company’s debt was too
high at $3 million—a figure sources said later grew to $5 million or more.
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