Diamond to Leave Food Network Post
By LINDA MOSS -- Multichannel News, 5/7/2000 6:00:00 PM MT
New York - Heidi Diamond, Food Network's senior vice president of strategic network development and marketing, will be leaving that post, she said last week.
Diamond said she will stay on at the network intermittently until the end of June. Food and its parent, Scripps Networks-which has a new lifestyle cable network in the works-are doing some restructuring, which would have left Diamond's job with less scope and fewer responsibilities, prompting her decision to leave.
"The company is going to consolidate a lot more functions down in Knoxville [Tenn., where Scripps is based]," Diamond said. "I still would have had a role, but it would have been in a much more diminished capacity."
Diamond isn't sure what she'll do next, but she said, "I'd love to find another opportunity to help build a brand."
Diamond did a stint at Ameritech Corp. as vice president of marketing and ad sales for its New Media Enterprises unit. She had also previously served as vice president of marketing for Nickelodeon domestic and for the United Kingdom.
The changes that Scripps, a unit of E.W. Scripps Co., has under way represent the last stages of a reorganization that started earlier this year, according to Food senior vice president and general manager Judy Girard.
With Scripps now having Food, Home & Garden Television, Do It Yourself and at least one other new lifestyle network in the works, the company wanted to combine and consolidate some of their functions in Knoxville, Girard said.
As a result, departments for affiliate sales, viewer services, events and on-air promotion are being set up there on the corporate level.
Previously, as head of Food's marketing effort, Diamond handled many of those duties all by herself, which will no longer be the case, according to Girard. "It got too big to leave it in the hands of one person," Girard said.
And that change in duties resulted in a job position that "is just not what [Diamond] wanted to do," according to Girard.
Girard declined to describe the new cable-network ideas Scripps is considering. But the programmer has at least one new channel actively in the works.
Scripps has previously said it was considering a business-to-business network aimed at people in the home-construction and decorating business. Sources also said Scripps was weighing an auto-related cable network. E.W. Scripps president and chief operating officer Ken Lowe is a big auto buff.
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