Today was a memo day at Time Inc. We mentioned that the digital head of Time Inc. Ned Desmond was leaving. Now, some more details on newly formed News group, which now includes Time Group, the Fortune/Money group, and the Sports Illustrated group, as well as Life.com and GEE. Vivek Shah, until now the head of Fortune/Money Group, will be bumped up to the digital head of the News unit, the company announced. John Reuter will move from Mexico to become SVP and Group GM, with the business office and production staff reporting to him.

The full memo from John Squires, below:

“To:    News Business Unit Employees
From:  John Squires  
Re:    News Business Unit

Yesterday Ann announced a significant reorganization of our company that is designed to give us greater flexibility to serve our readers and advertisers in a very difficult period.  With that announcement comes the creation of the News Business Unit, including the print and digital properties of the TIME Group, the FORTUNE/MONEY Group, the SPORTS ILLUSTRATED GROUP, as well as LIFE.com and GEE.  We will be organizing ourselves along functional lines under three executives:

Mark Ford will lead advertising sales and marketing for the group as President and Group Publisher. All publishers will report to Mark as well as advertising and marketing executives.  In addition, public relations and our conference division will report to Mark. He will have a dotted line relationship to Stephanie George and will represent the group on Stephanie’s Ad Council.

John Reuter will move from Mexico to become Senior Vice President and Group General Manager, with the business office and production staff reporting to him. John will report to Time Inc. CFO Howard Averill. He will continue to oversee Grupo Editorial Expansion, where he has named Manuel Rivera to replace him as Director General. In addition, John will have Richard Evans report to him from London. Richard will oversee all international operations for TIME, FORTUNE and SPORTS ILLUSTRATED.

Vivek Shah will be the Group Digital President.  Reporting to Vivek will be Jeff Price, Jonathan Shar, John Cantarella and Andy Blau with respect to LIFE.com. More of the memo after the jump…

I know Mark, John and Vivek are committed to success and I’m delighted to be working with such a talented team.  We also welcome the opportunity to work more closely with Time Inc. Editor in Chief John Huey and our editors: Terry McDonell, Editor of the SPORTS ILLUSTRATED GROUP; Rick Stengel, Managing Editor, TIME; Andy Serwer, Managing Editor, FORTUNE; and Eric Schurenberg, MONEY’s Managing Editor.

Of course, there any many additional details we need to work through on reporting structure and responsibilities over the next couple of weeks.  And this is certainly a dramatic change for a group of magazines that have operated in a highly decentralized business environment for years. 

We will need to work differently.  We need to share more information.  We need to be more collaborative.  We need to respect that good ideas can come from any corner of our business.  And we need to seize those good ideas and move them quickly to market. We’re eager to get the period of difficult cost reduction behind us and focus on your ideas for building new revenues and growing our business. 

Thank you for your understanding and patience.  If there are any questions I can answer directly, I’d be happy to hear from you.

John”