Yahoo CEO Bartz Plans Major Reorganization

Yahoo's new CEO, Carol Bartz, plans to reorganize the company to run under more centralized oversight, according to a report in Monday's Wall Street Journal. Following Yahoo's Pyrrhic victory last year against a Microsoft takeover, Bartz needs to get the troubled company firing on all cylinders again. To do so, she aims to bring a more unified design to Yahoo's products and combine groups with duplicative functions. The Wall Street Journal reports that Bartz's corporate reorganization plan could be announced this week. A Yahoo spokesperson declined to comment, stating that the company does not comment on rumor or speculation. A minor complication for Bartz's plan is the departure of Neeraj Khemlani, general manager of Yahoo's news group. Khemlani, it was revealed on Monday, has decided to leave Yahoo to take a position as VP and special assistant to the CEO for digital media at Hearst. According to Kara Swisher, writing for All Things D, Khemlani had been in line to helm one of the three arms of Yahoo's new content organization: vertical programming, network programming, and search monetization. Last summer, Yahoo endured what was widely characterized as an executive exodus, as longtime managers and technical stars left the company. The departing executives included Qi Lu, executive VP of engineering for Yahoo's search group; Brad Garlinghouse, senior VP of communications and communities; Vish Makhijani, senior VP of Yahoo's search group; Caterina Fake and Stewart Butterfield, co-founders of Flickr; Usama Fayyad, Yahoo's chief data officer; Bradley Horowitz, VP of product strategy; and Jeff Weiner, executive VP of Yahoo's network group. Under the new corporate structure, CTO Aristotle Balogh, who joined Yahoo in January 2008, is expected to shoulder greater responsibility, possibly as the executive in charge of all of Yahoo's products.