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Who

The senior vice president in charge of digital operations at the New York Times, Nisenholtz oversees the newspaper's online business activities.

Backstory

Nisenholtz has been working in digital media nearly as long as digital media has been around. A onetime academic, he dropped out of the Ph.D. program at UPenn and joined the faculty of NYU, where he co-founded the school's Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) in 1980. Three years later he traded academia for advertising, helping the ad agency Ogilvy start up its nascent interactive marketing group. He joined the Times as president of its electronic media division in 1985 and spearheaded the launch of nytimes.com. Four years later, with the dotcom crazy at its peak, Nisenholtz was named CEO of New York Times Digital, a stand-alone company that the Sulzberger family had hoped would one day go public. Those plans went by the boards when the dotcom bubble burst and in 2005 the company was folded back into the existing Times corporate structure. As part of the consolidation, Nisenholtz was named senior vice president of digital operations; he now reports to New York Times Co. CEO Janet Robinson and also serves on the company's all-powerful seven-person executive committee.

Of note

While revenue figures at the print division of the Gray Lady get bleaker by the day, the online division is growing leaps and bounds, and is now responsible for generating roughly ten percent of the company's annual revenues. One of Nisenholtz's biggest moves in recent years was the March 2005 acquisition of About.com for $400 million from KKR-controlled Primedia. But he's also focused his attention on growth from within, pouring resources into building up the site's content offerings to include more audio, video, and blogs (such as Cathy Horyn's On the Runway, Andrew Ross Sorkin's DealBook, and Frank Bruni's Diner's Journal). But while Niseholtz is regarded as an online visionary and one of the foremost experts on the intersection of content and technology, his purview has been diminished a bit over the past few years: He no longer has oversight over the editorial side of the site. (That's Jon Landman's job.) Still, Nisenholtz earned a measure of vindication in 2007 when Arthur Sulzberger Jr. finally decided to abandon the company's previous policy of charging users for online access to editorials and op-ed pieces. A longtime opponent of the plan, Nisenholtz had warned Sulzberger it wasn't a particularly good idea years earlier.

Personal

His and his wife, Anne Stockler Nisenholtz, have two daughters and live in Armonk.