UPDATE: SCMP rocked by senior departures

SCMP    DEPARTURE    NEWSPAPER 

Hong Kong - Shortly after Michael McComb (pictured), director of marketing and communications at The South China Morning Post announced his departure, Ross Settles has now resigned from his role as director of digital business for SCMP.com.

However, Eric Levin, chief financial officer for the SCMP Group said all projects were still moving forward very aggressively.

"We're running a great newspaper product and will continue to innovate and come up with great products," Levin said.

"We have a lot of tremendously talented people and we're moving forward on everything that we're working on," he said.

McComb joined SCMP in August 2008 and has been actively involved in the strategic review of the business at the corporate level including a recent restructuring of the marketing department in the company.

As part of the restructuring, he said the company was looking at display advertising, relationship with key advertisers, nature of job listing and the job recruitment industry in classified post, circulation and media news behaviour for print and online.

Working closely with the marketing team, McComb made recommendations to change the structure significantly from a very centralised structure to a decentralised structure.

He explained this meant putting circulation marketing, recruitment marketing and display advertising marketing back into those functions. 

"Obviously, its been a challenging year but it's been a year where we did a lot of strategic thinking about the future of the business here at SCMP, especially restructuring the business to be better prepared for the future," he said. 

This include fundamentally changing the view of how the publishing company view itself from a traditional newspaper to an integrated print and online business as well as its commercial business component to look beyond selling ad space to customers but adding value by providing events and custom publishing services. 

McComb said he has added value to the company and it's time to move on to look for other opportunities. 

He admitted that his background, talent, skills and interest are not in sync with what the company focuses on in the immediate term. 

SCMP.com's director of digital, Settles, who was a likely candidate to fill in the role of director of marketing and communications has also called it quits last Friday. 

Settles was not available for comment at press time. 

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