After less than two years on the job, Kevin Shea has stepped down as group vice-president, convergence at Bell Globemedia and will not be replaced – prompting speculation that the media giant is abandoning efforts to combine its print, TV and Internet sales strategies.

‘Kevin was given a difficult assignment to expand our lines of business,’ said Ivan Fecan, president and CEO of Bell Globemedia and CEO of CTV, in an Oct. 2 statement, ‘but times change and we need to concentrate on value creation closer to our core businesses.’

To that end, Bell Globemedia will withdraw from new business ventures – such as so-called ‘place-based media,’ providing content to news ticker displays in malls and elevators, for example – and seek out opportunities with its conventional and specialty TV properties.

Bell Globemedia, which bought CTV and The Globe and Mail in 2000, also controls TSN, Discovery Channel Canada, The Comedy Network and Sympatico, among others. Bell Globemedia is controlled by BCE.

Shea’s resignation comes just two weeks after that of Kirk LaPointe, the CTV news executive hired to help drive editorial convergence.

Company spokesperson Tom Curzon denies Bell Globemedia is ‘stepping away from convergence,’ but concedes that some projects previously overseen by Shea are going ‘on the back burner, if not closing down entirely.’

‘We’re just pulling back to what we consider very important,’ he says, ‘and that’s CTV and our specialty channels, where we can get some integrated marketing plans.’ Curzon is also quick to put down rumors that Shea was fired. ‘When that division was folded up he felt it was best that he step down.’

The industry has been rife for months with speculation that parent company BCE is set to jettison some or all of its media properties as it looks to prop up its sagging stock. Shea’s departure will add fuel to such rumors as experts continue to announce the death of convergence.

‘A lot of these companies have flawed strategies,’ says Neeraj Monga, senior investment analyst at Veritas Investment Research. ‘From a customer’s perspective, how is convergence beneficial? You watch TV for its content and you read the news because it will give you a different perspective. The way I see it, as a customer, if BCE owns ROB TV and The Globe and Mail and I get the same opinion…do I really believe what they are saying? Where is my perspective coming from? There are no competing perspectives under the convergence umbrella and I think customers don’t like that.’

Monga points to similar problems at AOL Time Warner and CanWest Global as evidence that the convergence model, poorly defined from day one, is coming unglued. Theoretical benefits such as back-end savings and integrated sales are outweighed by dissatisfied customers and a critical lack of revenue.

‘[Pre-convergence] industries were divided along vertical lines – telephony, cable and media and publishing,’ he says, ‘but now with these conglomerates getting into one another, the customer has stayed the same; I am still the same person, my spending has not increased on these services. But now I have three people who want to provide me those services. So everybody has high costs, lower revenue, lower margins.’

-www.bellglobemedia.com