Updated: colleague’s name @ 1:47 p.m. 1/8/10
He may not live in Philadelphia quite yet, but Philly.com President Ryan Davis says he’s “a southeast Pennsylvanian at heart.”
Ryan Davis
Of course, in the interest of disclosure, it should be made clear that Davis, who was put in charge of Philadelphia’s most visited Web site in October, lives in New York City, a rival if there ever was one.
The native of Allentown takes a daily train trip to Center City but says he, his wife and their new baby daughter — who he says has delayed the move — will be relocated to the region in the coming months.
If you’d think his location would keep Davis from the gig, the age of this 32-year-old might, too, seem like an obstacle. Yet there at the Market Street Philly.com headquarters he is, and, like every where else he’s gone professionally, he’s gotten there quickly.
Outside of college, Davis has never spent as much as three years with a single organization during his precipitous rise from aspiring journalist to newspaper dot com chief executive.
After graduating from Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism in 2000, Davis spent 29 months reporting with the St. Petersburg Times and then two years and nine months at the Baltimore Sun. He spent two years in Manhattan with executive management consulting firm McKinsey before taking the director of strategic operations position with Philly.com in February. Nine months later, he was named president of the 70-person staff.
That rise, he says, has put him where he wants to be when he wants to be there.
“It’s an exciting time when a lot of people are trying to figure out what local means on the Internet,” he says.
Below, Davis explains living in New York, lays out his priorities for improving on 72 million monthly page views and talks about the coming explosion of local on the Web.
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