Johnston Press’ digital director Lori Cunningham, who joined in February 2008, is leaving the news publisher next month.
Cunningham had previously been a new business head at Net-a-porter and strategy VP at AOL (NYSE: AOL) UK. No news of her next move.
An internal memo obtained by Allmediascotland credits her with outsourcing online jobs classifieds to Associated Northcliffe Digital, which has saved the publisher money, and with buying in new web management service from Polopoly that will mean upcoming website redesigns.
Traffic on Johnston’s network of 319 local news websites got an average 352,080 daily browsers during the last six months of 2008 (the first period for which stats are available), rising to 384,016 in the last six months of 2009, according to ABCe.
Johnston trialled payments and registration models on six local newspapers earlier this year. It ended the trials without commenting publicly and without retaining the models, but murmurs came out of the company that it had been a “disaster”, with subscribers in single figures.