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Kraig Kitchin will stay with the company, but resigned from the top job after friction with fellow Beck executive Jonathan Schreiber. A ‘mass exodus’ of staff may follow.In what knowledgeable observers say is a sign of increasing turmoil in Glenn Beck’s troubled media empire, Beck’s longtime mentor and corporate executive, Kraig Kitchin, has quit as CEO of The Blaze.Kitchin’s replacement, Stewart Padveen, a digital startup entrepreneur who joined Beck’s company last summer, will be the fourth leader of The Blaze since late 2014.Kitchin, 54, who took over operations of Beck’s conservative-leaning subscription digital and cable television enterprise last June—after two previous CEOs abruptly left in the space of six months—is resigning along with two other senior executives: Jeremy Price, director of advertising sales, and Liz Julis, director of marketing.Both are based in New York, 1,500 miles removed from corporate headquarters in the Dallas suburb of Irving, Texas.Several other key employees, including at least two senior producers based in The Blaze’s shrinking New York operation, are expected to follow them out the door.A source close to the situation predicted a “mass exodus” from the New York studios, which are housed in a largely unoccupied 35,000 square-foot space at Midtown Manhattan’s Bryant Park, previously rented by Yahoo, under a 10-year lease costing Beck’s privately held company an estimated $2 million a year.Kitchin—who co-founded Premiere Radio Networks three decades ago and has worked with personalities as diverse as Rush Limbaugh, Ryan Seacrest, Whoopi Goldberg, and Beck—tried to put the best face on his resignation in a company-wide email sent out Thursday night.He described his apparently self-imposed demotion as a result of outside business obligations.“Our organization—The Blaze—deserves and needs an exclusively focused leader and that’s something I cannot provide, given existing commitments I choose to honor,” Kitchin wrote, adding that “I’m not leaving this company. I’ll stay with The Blaze,
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Topic: Head of Glenn Beck’s Media Empire Quits as The Blaze Burns Down (Read 396 times)
