Ross Levinsohn

Education and sports

Levinsohn was born in New York City, grew up Tenafly, New Jersey and graduated from Tenafly High School in 1981, where he lettered in football, soccer, golf and baseball for the varsity teams. Levinsohn graduated from American University with a bachelor's degree in broadcast communications. He joined its board of trustees in 2015.

Early career

While in college, Levinsohn's entrepreneurial nature took shape, when he and his college roommate started a promotional company named Ross Productions. Building a database of students and young executives in the Washington, DC area, the company staged events on a nightly and weekly basis. Upon graduating, Levinsohn moved to New York and joined Saatchi & Saatchi focused on advertising accounts for daytime dramas as part of the Procter and Gamble account including As The World Turns and Guiding Light. Following, Levinsohn worked in sports marketing and promotion at Lapin & Rose where he helped promote and market some of the biggest boxing events globally including the Sugar Ray Leonard vs. Marvin Hagler "Superfight". and later he joined sports marketing and management powerhouse ProServ. which represented the likes of Michael Jordan, Jimmy Connors, and hundred of other athletes and events. Levinsohn developed marketing and promotional campaigns for athletes, TV and events, and dabbled at representing athletes during this period.

Marketing and promotions

His previous experience led him to a new role in 1989 at HBO in marketing and promotions for the pay cable giant and its newly formed unit, Time Warner Sports. Levinsohn was promoted in 1993 to launch a new group that created and oversaw new production, licensing and ventures to expand and monetize the HBO brand across all platforms, which led to his first foray in digital. In 1994, he helped develop content for CompuServe, Prodigy and America Online on behalf of HBO. In 1995, he was recognized as one of the "30 under 30" media execs by GQ Magazine.

Internet

In early 1996 Levinsohn was recruited by SportsLine USA founder Mike Levy, to join the startup sports website in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida. He oversaw all content and product for the company, which quickly grew to become one of the most important sites in the early days of the internet. In 1997, during the first growth phase of the industry, SportsLine raised money from Kleiner Perkins and then went public through a highly successful IPO. CBS bought a piece of the company and rebranded it CBS Sportsline.com. Levinsohn went on to expand the content and product offerings including building the largest and most successful Fantasy Sports business in the industry at the time, and official websites for superstars Michael Jordan, Wayne Gretzky, Shaq O'Neill, Pete Sampras and the San Francisco 49ers. He and also produced a syndicated television show starring NFL coaches Marv Levy and Sam Wyche, and host Scott Kaplan entitled "Football Playbook" and syndicated radio programming on Westwood One. He is credited with helping launch the careers of personalities including Kaplan and sports "shock jock" Sid Rosenberg.

During the height of the first Internet boom, Levinsohn was recruited to help envision and launch the portal division for online search giant Alta Vista in 1999. At the time, Alta Vista was the leading search engine in the world. Within six months Alta Vista Live was launched and quickly grew to one of the most popular content and services sites in the world. Alta Vista was days away from going public in March 2000, when the first crash of the Internet occurred. Following the crash, Alta Vista was sold to Inktomi, which later was acquired by Yahoo.

News Corporation

In 2000, Levinsohn joined the internet division of News Corporation, News Digital Media. From 2001 to 2005, he was Senior Vice President and General Manager at Fox Sports Interactive Media where he led the interactive sports business for Fox, including the FoxSports.com site, which grew from a few hundred thousand users to more than 35 million monthly users and competed as the most popular sports site in the United States. In late 2004, he was tasked with developing a broader digital strategy for the global media powerhouse and was named President of Fox Interactive Media. A direct report to Rupert Murdoch and Peter Chernin, Levinsohn assumed day-to-day operating responsibility for the main Fox web properties including Fox Sports.com, Fox.com, and Fox News.com and spearheaded an investment and acquisition strategy that led to the acquisitions of MySpace, IGN, Askmen.com, Scout.com, Newroo and KSolo. In less than a year, Fox's Internet properties went from an also ran to the top of the industry, and were generating more page views than any other sites in the United States, in large part due to the growth of MySpace. Fox acquired MySpace in 2005 long before the social networking boom. MySpace, at the time, was adding roughly 70,000 new users a day. A year later the site was adding more than 15 million new users a month and revenue had grown to over $200 million a year. Capitalizing on this success, in 2006, Fox Interactive signed a search and advertising deal in which Google paid Fox for exclusive rights to certain search and some display inventory for nearly $1 billion. Fox Interactive Media's properties grew to a become one of the most 5 most visited businesses on the web during Levinsohn's tenure and maintained its growth for more than a year after his dismissal by News Corp President Peter Chernin. Chernin and News Corp Chairman Rupert Murdoch quickly had realized that Levinsohn acquisition of MySpace and other smaller properties were poor strategic decisions. News Corp would later take significant write-offs on Fox Interactive Media.

Fuse Capital

Having acquired and invested in dozens of companies, and finding a passion for fostering entrepreneurs, in December 2007, Levinsohn and former AOL Chairman Jonathan Miller launched Velocity Interactive Group, a media and communications investment fund along with India's Keyur Patel. Levinsohn and Miller failed to raise any capital on their own and eventually joined with Silicon Valley venture firm ComVentures. Re-branded as Fuse Capital, the partners invested in early stage startup in the US, India and China. In India, it led investments in leading media outlets NDTV and India TV, and Fuse+Media, which financed motion pictures, while domestically the company invested in the likes of Generate (sold to Alloy), Broadband Enterprises (sold to Specific Media), Next New Networks (sold to Google) and 5:1 (sold to Yahoo). Through 2016, their fund has failed to return invested capital back to investors. Most limited partners expect it to be amongst the worst returning funds of its vintage.

Yahoo

In October 2010, Levinsohn was recruited by Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz to lead the company's largest division, Yahoo Americas, where he assumed responsibility for its massive media and advertising businesses. After leadership changes at the top of the company, new CEO Scott Thompson named Levinsohn Head of Global Media for a brief period of time, before Thompson's exit.

He was Interim Yahoo CEO in 2012 after Carol Bartz left Yahoo. Nine weeks later, the Board surprised many inside and outside the company by naming Google executive Marissa Mayer to lead Yahoo. Shortly after the Mayer appointment, Levinsohn left the company in August.

Guggenheim

Following his exit at Yahoo, Levinsohn joined investment manager Guggenheim Securities, where he assumed a new role as CEO of Guggenheim Digital Media. In this role, he was tasked with investing and acquiring media assets, and actively pursued both Hulu and Vevo as potential acquisitions. He also oversaw a portfolio of assets already under management by Guggenheim including The Hollywood Reporter, Billboard, Adweek and the Clio Awards.

Los Angeles Times

On August 21, 2017 Levinsohn was named the publisher and CEO of the LA Times by Tronc, replacing Davan Maharaj.