Dave Callaway, the editor in chief of USA Today, is leaving the company next month, the newspaper reported Thursday.
Callaway, who joined USA Today in 2012, will become CEO of TheStreet Inc., a financial news and services company founded by television personality Jim Cramer and Martin Peretz.
He will be replaced in the interim by Patty Michalski, the newspaper’s managing editor for digital, while parent company Gannett looks for Callaway’s replacement.
In a memo to USA Today’s staff, Joanne Lipman, Gannett’s Chief Content Officer, praised Callaway’s five-year run at the help of the company’s flagship newspaper, according to USA Today. He spearheaded Gannett’s USA Today Network initiative, sped up the newspaper’s digital metabolism, grew its digital audience and integrated its various editorial teams.
“Over the past four years, Dave Callaway has led a remarkable resurgence at USA TODAY,” Lipman said in a staff memo. “We will miss him terribly. But huge congratulations are in order for Dave. The new post is a recognition of the superb work he has done here.”
USA Today has an average weekday circulation of about 4 million, according to a report issued in June 2015 by the Alliance for Audited Media. That’s including the insertion of so-called “butterfly editions” into newspapers across America, which bumps USA Today’s weekday circulation considerably.
At TheStreet, Callaway will reunite with Larry Kramer, who hired him as editor of USA Today in 2012 when he was publisher and president. Kramer relinquished the publisher job in June 2015 and became interim CEO of TheStreet earlier this year while also serving as chairman.
Callaway and Kramer’s history goes beyond USA Today. Callaway was an early editor at Marketwatch, the financial news and information company founded by Kramer and eventually sold to Dow Jones in 2004. Before that, he was a securities industry reporter at Bloomberg News.
