“Thank you for your email. I am currently out of the office.”
That’s the automatic reply one gets when sending an electronic mail to John Janedis, who has served as SVP/Capital Markets and Investor Relations at TEGNA since December 2018.
With talk of bids from Apollo Global Management, Byron Allen’s group and even Trinity Broadcasting Network making headlines of late and Soohyung Kim’s Standard General putting pressure on TEGNA for representation on its Board of Directors, it turns out Janedis won’t be returning to his office at the company formerly known as Gannett.
Janedis is returning to Wall Street to take a seat Marci Ryvicker once held.
According to a statement released Monday, Janedis is being named Managing Director and head of the media team at Wolfe Research.
The slot had been open since January, when Ryvicker, a senior equity analyst at Wolfe following her exit from Wells Fargo Securities, is now SVP/Investor Relations at Comcast.
Ryvicker built the media team from scratch in her time at Wolfe, and Managing Partner Ed Wolfe caled Janedis the “ideal person” to take over and lead it.
Before taking the TEGNA post, Janedis was Managing Director of Jefferies LLC in New York.
He took that role in May 2014 following a stint in a similar role at UBS Securities.
Interestingly, Janedis was at Wachovia, and later at Wells Fargo following the former bank’s demise in the late 2000s financial crisis, as a Managing Director. Those roles came after positions at Banc of America Securities and, before that, at Morgan Stanley.
He is a 1992 graduate of New York University, and holds a MBA from Stern School of Business, earned at NYU in 1997.
“I have worked at large banks in the past and they don’t truly value research, since their models favor other areas such as banking, prime brokerage and derivatives over content,” Janedis said. “Only a research-first firm like Wolfe would have propelled me to move back from industry to the sell-side. Their growth and hiring discipline has stood in stark contrast to what their industry peers have demonstrated over the past decade. I look forward to collaborating with a highly talented group of research and sales professionals and re-launching soon.”
