• by Sara Guaglione , January 28, 2016

USA Today, part of Gannett Co., Inc., announced Tuesday that Michael Kuntz will be joining as senior vice president of digital revenue.

With over 15 years of experience in digital media, Kuntz is leaving his position as senior vice president of global sales and partnerships at Gawker Media Group, where he oversaw the company’s advertising business.

In other words, Gawker Media just lost its top ad executive.

In his new role at USA Today, Kuntz will report to chief revenue officer, Kevin Gentzel, responsible for driving revenue gains across USA Today Networks digital assets, which serve more than 100 million unique visitors every month.

Kuntz will focus on digital sales, operations and programmatic to grow the network’s multiplatform advertising solutions.

Prior to joining Gawker, Kuntz served as publisher and chief revenue officer of Popular Mechanics at Hearst Corporation. Before that, he oversaw corporate digital sales and business development at Rodale.

Kuntz is the second top ad sales person to ditch Gawker Media in the last three months. In October, Andrew Gorenstein, the president of advertising and partnerships, resigned as part of a reorganization of the business side of the company.

Gawker Media has faced numerous hurdles recently. The company will go to trial in March to defend itself against a $100 million invasion of privacy suit filed by Terry Bollea, aka WWE star Hulk Hogan. Bollea is suing Gawker for publishing a video of him having sex with his best friend’s wife.

Journalist Ashley Terrill is also suing Gawker. She’s asking for $10 million, claiming the company failed to protect her confidentiality when she asked its editors for help in a story she was working on about allegations of sexual harassment at Tinder.

Traffic across Gawker Media’s several sites dropped 16% in December from the previous year, according to comScore.