DC lost about half of its New York employees when it made the move to California, according to an interview with DC Entertainment Co-Publishers Dan Didio and Jim Lee in the Los Angeles Times. The New York employees that did make the move comprise about one-third of the 240 employees in Burbank, with another one-third employees that were already sited in California, and 1/3 new hires. The consolidation in California "really required a lot of conviction and courage and vision," Lee said.
Getting the whole company together in proximity to Warner Bros. will bring benefits, Lee told the Times. "One of the exciting things about being so close to the rest of the company is that you see all of the experimentation and the fun they're having with our characters," he said. "We want to transfer that level of energy to our publishing team [and] to recognize that for us to be meaningful within this whole ecosystem, we have to be leaders and not just this dusty archive of source material."
The Co-Publishers had declined to reveal the percentage of the staff that was making the move last October (see "Interview with Lee and Didio"), but Didio expressed his feelings about losing some of the staff. "There is a certain melancholy that comes on because some of the people that you’ve worked with for an extraordinarily long period of time, extraordinary contributors, won’t be there," he told ICv2. "Like any company, like any business, even our characters, we have to bring change to it, and we have to make the change good and exciting for all of us."
In addition to discussing the impact of the move with the Times, the co-publishers also discussed the over-all direction of the company, where growing readership by reaching women, minorities, and LGBT readers has become a high priority. "We feel that it is the future of our business," Lee said. "It's not going to just happen naturally... I think if our goal is to mirror the diversity that is our readership, we need to move with some speed and some sense of purpose."
The Company's Strategy Going Forward
Posted by Milton Griepp on June 4, 2015 @ 2:30 am CT