Jim Spanfeller
Former President and CEO, Forbes.com
James J. Spanfeller serves as President & Chief
Executive Officer of Forbes.com, a leading media Internet company, and
as Executive Vice President of Electronic Publishing for Forbes,
publisher of Forbes, the nation's leading business magazine. As
CEO of Forbes.com, he oversees all aspects of the strategic and
operational management of the company. He is the first person to hold
the position of Executive Vice President of Electronic Publishing at
Forbes, a position created in recognition of the driving need to link
all elements of the company's business to the Internet. In this
capacity, Mr. Spanfeller develops and oversees joint opportunities for
print and online across all areas of Forbes.
Prior
to joining Forbes, Mr. Spanfeller was President, Consumer Magazine Group
of Ziff Davis Media, Inc., the largest technology publishing company in
the United States. The titles under his responsibility were PC
Magazine, Yahoo! Internet Life, Smart Business, Family
PC and Expedia Travels. He also managed Corporate Sales and
Custom Publishing and was on the company's Board of Directors. He joined
Ziff Davis Media in 1996 to launch Yahoo! Internet Life, as
Founding Publisher, and oversaw all aspects of the business, including
editorial, circulation, production, marketing and advertising sales.
This magazine launch was one the most successful in the last decade, and
the publication now has a circulation of 1.1 million. He also had
direct supervision of the magazine's Web site, which attracted over 4
million page views a month. Before working at Ziff Davis Media, Mr.
Spanfeller was Publisher of Inc. magazine, and he has also been Senior
Vice President, Marketing/Associate Publisher of Playboy Enterprises
Publishing Group, which owns and operates Playboy Magazine. Prior
to this he held senior sales positions at Newsweek.
Mr. Spanfeller has a BA in English Literature from Union
College, Schenectady, New York. He sits on the Board of Directors of The
New York Chapter of The National Foundation for Teaching
Entrepreneurship To At Risk Youth (NFTE); served as Executive Director
of The Magazine Publishers Association, 1999-2000; and was named one of Folio
magazine's "40 Industry Visionaries" in 1999. Mr. Spanfeller lives in
New York City with his wife, Peg, and their three daughters.