MySpace: Jason Hirschhorn Stepping Down as Co-President
The experimental four-month co-presidency with Mike Jones ends. Jones will run the company solo.
MySpace co-president Jason Hirschhorn has left the company, the Los Angeles-based social media site announced late Thursday afternoon. He ran the site with fellow co-president Mike Jones since February in a somewhat unusual corporate arrangement.
Jones will remove the “co-” from his job title and run the company solo. Mere hours after a rumor about Hirschhorn began circulating, Jon Miller, chief digital officer for the parent company News Corp., confirmed Hirschhorn’s departure with the following statement:
“We fully respect Jason’s decision to leave and his personal desire to return to New York…And as I know Jason agrees, Mike Jones has done an outstanding job leading MySpace into its next evolution and is the right person to take the reins. There are no plans to bring in additional management.”
Hirschhorn was elevated to co-president after serving as MySpace’s chief product officer for 10 months, dating back to April 2009. Since then, he built a reputation for sacking auxiliary brand products in an attempt to better define MySpace’s core identity.
The 38-year-old executive also has the following positions on his resume: president of Sling Media Entertainment; founding partner at TripleH Media Advisors; and head of digital at MTV – where he left in 2006 after a six-year stint with the brand.
Hirschhorn’s departure marks another turbulent turn in MySpace’s recent history of leadership. In February, then-CEO Owen Van Natta stepped down after only 10 months on the job. It was then that News Corp. brass decided to try the ill-fated Hirschhorn-Jones experiment.
Follow Christopher Heine on Twitter at @ChrisClickZ.
