After 95 years in business, Fortune Media has finally picked a woman to run its magazine, event and digital news brands. The media company announced today (April 9) that its chief financial officer Anastasia Nyrkovskaya had been promoted to CEO, replacing Alan Murray, who announced in October 2023 he would step down at the end of this month.
“Anastasia has steered Fortune through three years of profitable growth—almost unheard of in the legacy magazine business,” Murray, a former Fortune editor who was named CEO in 2018, said in a statement. “She has helped lead Fortune’s transformation into a profitable global multi-platform media company and is the right person to lead it into its second century.”
Nyrkovskaya, who came to Fortune in 2019, told The New York Times in an interview that Fortune was profitable and had expanded by adding 130 employees in the last 12 months, bringing the total staff count to 360. She also said the company’s newsroom had doubled in size since 2021, to 100 employees. Fortune launched a paywall in March 2020, shortly after Nyrkovskaya joined. The same year, it turned a profit.
Nyrkovskaya revealed in her interview with the Times that 40 percent of Fortune’s revenue came from digital advertising and online subscriptions, 30 percent was from branded events and 25 percent was from the print magazine.
“For the past five years, I have been focused on fiscal responsibility and the development of new revenue streams to sustain and grow the business,” Nyrkovskaya was quoted as saying in the press release. “Looking ahead, I am excited to drive more focus and growth in journalism and business as Fortune expands globally.”
Before Fortune, Nyrkovskaya held financial leadership positions at BirchBox, XpresSpa and NBCUniversal. Fortune also hired its first female editor-in-chief, Alyson Shontell, in 2021. Coming from over a decade at Business Insider, she was tasked with catching up Fortune’s newsroom with the rest of digital media.
Fortune is owned by Thai billionaire Chatchaval Jiaravanon, the chairman of Thailand’s largest business conglomerate, Charoen Pokphand Group. He bought the magazine for $150 million in cash in 2018.