Keith J. Kelly

Keith J. Kelly

Media

Tronc VP exits to work on his novel

Jim Spanfeller is out at as a senior vice president at Tronc, less than a year after Chairman Michael Ferro’s company bought Spanfeller Media, a venture-backed company that included the foodie title The Daily Meal and the health-wellness and extreme sports site the Active Times.

Since the deal, Daily’s Meal’s traffic jumped to 2.7 million unique visitors a month from 2.1 million a year earlier while Active Time’s traffic has tumbled to 257,000, down from 436,000.

At the time of the acquisition, Spanfeller was pegged as an executive charged with scouting digital acquisitions for the company that owns the Chicago Tribune and the LA Times.

Instead, the company fumbled its $110 million bid to buy Us Weekly, which went instead to underbidder American Media Inc. More recently, Tronc agreed to buy the teetering tabloid Daily News for $1.

Spanfeller told Media Ink, “I always expected to leave after the [Spanfeller Media] deal was safely tucked in. I’m planning to take some time to finish a novel I’ve been working on for 20-plus years and then get back in the game somewhere.”

No replacement has been named.