Braving Bad Juju, International Business Times Moves Into Newsweek’s Old Newsroom
By Kat Stoeffel July 6, 2011 4:59 pm
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The International Business Times inherited the old Newsweek newsroom at 7 Hanover Square over the weekend.
A general interest global business news site, IBT has flown under the radar since their launch five years ago. But perhaps not for long. Executive editor Jonathan Davis pointed out that the space is far too big for their staff of roughly 50 reporters, suggesting a hiring spree is on the way. (What warms a new office better?)
“We were bursting at the seams at the [previous] Cortland Street space”, Mr. Davis told The Observer. “There’s a lot more room for expansion and we want to pursue that aggressively this year.”
So perhaps dwindling staff can explain Newsweek’s discontent there. The
building was so unpopular with the weekly’s staff that they took to Tumblr to complain.
Newsweek subleased the fifth and sixth floors from Guardian Life Insurance immediately after the merger with the Daily Beast was announced. The move from the “high-end sushi bar” at 395 Hudson saved the embattled mag $6.3 million in rent and operating costs alone.
It was expected Tina Brown’s Daily Beast staff would have to slum it with their new siblings, but within a month the whole family planned to retreat to Stepmommy Dearest’s Frank Gehry home, where, it turns out, there is a magic machine that shows you what dead princesses would look like if they were still alive today.
IBT is all settled on the fifth floor, and will take over the sixth floor, too, once Newsweek moves all their stuff out (their lease on that floor is not yet done).
“They got out of there pretty fast,” said a new tenant.
“We like the space, there’s potential for a lot of synergy between the verticals, which is something we can make good use of,” Mr. Davis said.
“I don’t know why they hated it.”
