Shopzilla announced Tuesday that its founding chairman and its president of two years will depart from the shopping search engine in the spring. William Glass, currently chief operating officer of Shopzilla, has been named president, replacing John Phelps, who has served as president of Shopzilla since shortly after it was acquired by E.W. Scripps in June 2005 for $525 million, and was its COO prior to that. Farhad Mohit, 37, Shopzilla’s co-founder and chief product officer, will also depart.
Scripps, which had been primarily a newspaper company, has been struggling to reinvent itself in the wake of acquisitions like Shopzilla and U.K. vertical search site uSwitch, as well as expansion of its Web properties for TV brands like HGTV and Food Network. In 2005, the company launched a niche broadband strategy which included a distribution deal with Yahoo Search.
The print side of its business has slid so far that Scripps is rumored to be considering a sale of its newspaper properties.