Yahoo Audience Head Jeff Dossett Departs Company
by Kara Swisher
Posted on May 28, 2009 at 1:20 PM PT
Yahoo’s SVP of North American Audience, Jeff Dossett, is leaving the company.
Reasons for the departure are personal, said sources, who said that Dossett (pictured here) is most likely to do a start-up.
Dossett did not return emails asking for comment, but Yahoo (YHOO) confirmed the departure to BoomTown.
It was announced internally that Dossett has resigned and his responsibilities have been assumed by Jimmy Pitaro, who runs Vertical Audience Experiences for Yahoo, and Tim Mayer, who is in charge of Search & Social Applications. They will jointly lead the North America Audience business, reporting to U.S. EVP Hilary Schneider.
Dossett has been in charge of all of Yahoo’s media assets, including its powerful News, Sports and Finance content sites.
He has been rejiggering the media unit since he arrived last year, including centralizing product development.
Dossett joined Yahoo last November, coming to the company from Microsoft (MSFT), where he was MSN executive producer and general manager.
In his job at MSN, Dossett was the lead for audience, content and programming strategy and execution in the U.S.
He had worked at the company since 1991, in a variety of sales and marketing jobs in Canada, and later worked on strategy and business development for MSN.
Dossett was also CEO of Carpoint, now MSN Autos, and was GM of its real estate arm.
He also took two years off from Microsoft in 2002 to climb the highest mountains on each of the seven continents, finally reaching the summit of Mount Everest in May of 2004.
Dossett reached the summit of Everest again for a second time last year.
Comments
he lasted all of 5 months? doesn’t look too good to join and then bail that fast…
hmmm…something smells here
Posted by Sam Harrison at May 28th, 2009 at 2:04 pm