Mike Isaac

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Here’s Zynga’s New Executive Org Chart

As AllThingsD previously reported, Zynga announced a complete overhaul of its executive ranks on Tuesday, effectively flattening out its top management levels and reorganizing the chain of command for its existing leadership.

The set of changes, made by newly crowned CEO Don Mattrick, are the largest the social gaming company has seen since the fall of 2012. As a result of the new org structure, three of Zynga’s C-level executives — COO David Ko, CTO Cadir Lee and chief people officer Colleen McCreary — will soon depart the company.

Update 12:21 am PDT: AllThingsD has learned that Todd Arnold, Senior Vice President of Games at Zynga, has also left the company. Before moving to SVP of games last year, Arnold previously worked as general manager of the Farmville gaming franchise.

Mattrick’s new plan aims to cut through a number of Zynga’s existing operational layers, according to a memo sent to employees, with the intent of moving senior management closer to product teams.

“Over the past month, I have had a chance to interact with a cross section of our employees and have been able to get a general sense of the caliber of people working here, the passion for winning and desire to get Zynga back to a strong leadership,” Mattrick said in his note to employees. “In parallel to these meetings, I have been working with our leaders to review different parts of our business in order to develop a set of operating principles to help reset the company.”

“We are now calibrating against the market opportunity and developing detailed plans to achieve topline growth and improve profitability in the future,” he wrote.

Mattrick has split the management teams into three divisions — Studios; Functional; and Technology, Live Ops and Publishing — and will now have 13 managers, listed below, directly reporting to him in the new org structure.

In the Studios division: Steve Chiang and Barry Cottle, who before acted as President of Games and Chief Revenue Officer, respectively, will now become EVP of Games for most of Zynga’s ’Ville titles and EVP of Games for Social Casino titles, respectively.

Tim LeTourneau will retain responsibility over the Farmville titles as SVP of Farmville Games, while Travis Boatman will handle Zynga’s “With Friends and Network” area. Steve Parkis will handle midcore games. Mark Skaggs and Jon Tien will also be SVPs in the division.

As far as Tech, Live Ops and Publishing goes, Cadir Lee’s CTO position will be split into two jobs: Nick Tornow will act as CTO and VP, while Dorion Carroll will assume the role of CIO and VP. Adam Sussman will be SVP Game Publishing, handling distribution, direct advertising sales and ops.

Lastly, Mark Vranesh will remain the company’s chief financial officer, while Meg Makalou will take over the role of VP of Human Resources, which essentially replaces the Chief People Officer role formerly inhabited by Colleen McCreary. Reggie Davis will continue in his role as general counsel.

The executive shake-up comes in the midst of an attempted company-wide turnaround, kicked off by Mattrick’s installment as CEO a little over a month ago. Once the dominant force in online social gaming, the ailing company has been forced to deal with crises on all sides, including massive staff turnover, sunken employee morale and a strained partnership with once-close ally Facebook.

Perhaps worst of all, Zynga has had to deal with the shock of a fleeing user base, which dropped to 187 million monthly active users from 306 million a year ago. This was caused, Zynga said, primarily by the massive consumer shift from desktop to mobile devices — an area in which Zynga’s game portfolio has sorely lacked. As a result, the company’s stock price has plunged to $2.91 per share from its peak of $14.69 in March of last year.

The company plans to hold an all-hands meeting at its San Francisco headquarters on Wednesday morning, where Mattrick will deliver remarks and take questions from employees.

“With the above in place, I believe that we will have the best chance to grow, build a world class executive team and culture, establish cadence and really become committed to important priorities and opportunities for our long term success,” Mattrick wrote.

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The problem with the Billionaire Savior phase of the newspaper collapse has always been that billionaires don’t tend to like the kind of authority-questioning journalism that upsets the status quo.

— Ryan Chittum, writing in the Columbia Journalism Review about the promise of Pierre Omidyar’s new media venture with Glenn Greenwald