Brown left her post as GM of Yahoo Media Group’s Lifestyles business unit in March 2007 to become president, of Scripps’ Interactive Group. Prior to that she had a stint at AOL (NYSE: TWX), was CEO and publisher at short-lived lifestyle magazine Breathe. And then, she was the CEO of Inside.com, where both Staci and Rafat worked back in the days. With Brown’s hire, Battelle is clearly not giving up the reins of the company as he previously indicated.

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The choice of Brown as COO is meant to solidify FM’s attempts to move beyond serving as a home for tech-centric community sites. In order to grow its revenues, FM has sought to broaden its profile to include verticals like home, food and entertainment. The move also comes as the display market has shown some signs of turning around as well. The company recently unveiled some larger Online Publishers Association-style display ad formats that it hopes will attract larger, more general marketers. In part, Brown will be directing those efforts to bring in some bigger names and their bigger ad spending.

Rafat adds: Deanna is doing what she does best: leave the jobs she joins after a year or two. Surprised she stayed at Scripps for 2.5 years, though the surprise this time is more because Scripps’ digital strategy has been languishing after they got burned with the costly Shopzilla and uSwitch acquisitions. I spoke to Battelle on the new appointment, and he insisted the search announcement earlier was for a “partner” to come in run the business. He can claim anything in semantics, but the reality is they were looking for a CEO, and settled on a President. But, everyone reports into Deanna, he told me, so she’s effectively running the biz. He said he will focus on creative efforts on working with clients and the authors, developing new solutions and thinking strategically about the business. I asked him about possible acquisitions of content companies or sites they work with, something that was speculated when the company raised that big funding round. It hasn’t happened, and Battelle said it was unlikely because buying any content site would imply favoritism. That said, they are looking at other things, but nothing imminent.

As for Scripps, here’s a statement on digital’s future: “We have been moving at warp speed and this transition gives us the chance to step back, take a breath and asses the next wave of opportunities for SN Digital to ensure we continue to lead the field when it comes to lifestyle content in the digital world.  Our current GMs and SVPs will continue to drive the business and manage the day-to-day of the websites.” Meaning they will figure it out, sooner or later….