Monster Affiliate Philly.com Hires Yahoo! ’Amigo’

Eric Grilly, president of MediaNews Group Interactive and a major driver of the Yahoo! consortium for HotJobs, has left his position to take a new job as head of Philly.com, the Web site for The Philadelphia Inquirer and The Philadelphia Daily News  and incidentally a Monster affiliate.

As a leader of the newspaper consortium, Grilly centralized all the negotiation among newspapers with Yahoo!, handling West Coast titles, while Hearst’s Lincoln Millstein handled East Coast titles. The loss of Grilly could cause momentum for the consortium to stall (although some newspapers had rankled at the centralized negotiations and could conceivably come in).

Grilly had recently been promoted to Senior VP of MediaNews Group, which has recently expanded with the acquisition of Knight Ridder's Northern California properties (The San Jose Mercury News, The Contra Costa Times and The Monterey County Herald). At the same time Eric Grilly was promoted, however, his father, Gerry Grilly, MediaNews Group's COO and head of Los Angeles News Group, left the company. He was replaced by Steven Rossi, who was senior VP of Knight Ridder.

It is not clear there is any connection between the two. (But maybe there was). A source who knows Eric Grilly says he wasn't pushed out and that it was simply “a great opportunity.” Philly.com was the first major newspaper site to break the newspaper industry’s cold war with Monster and is said to have “a first rate team” for recruitment.