Alan Brake
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Managing editor of The Architect’s Newspaper Alan Brake will be taking the lead as executive editor next month, Matt Chaban reports for The New York Observer.  The current executive editor, Julie Iovine, is stepping down.

Brake told Chaban that he already has a few ideas for the paper: more art and more criticism. “Ideally, I’d like to review a significant new building, landscape, or public space in every issue,” Brake told Chaban. “There’s definitely a demand for criticism, based on the numbers we can track on the web.”

As the new executive editor, Brake has sizable shoes to fill. Before coming on with A|N, Iovine was a features reporter and editor at The New York Times. Her six-year tenure at A|N began in 2004, the year after the paper was founded. Since that time she has overseen a “vast expansion online that has seen considerable gains in web traffic, as well as the launching of new editions of the paper and conferences,” Chaban writes.   

In other architecture-journalism news, Architectural Record’s Jenna McKnight has left the magazine to run Architizer. She leaves the 120-year-old publication, where she served as news director, for the just-under-three-years-old Web startup. McKnight will serve as its editor-in-chief.

“Over the next few months Jenna will be working with our excellent staff to expand our content and make sure that we are giving our readers what they want—the latest and greatest from the world’s most creative architects and designers,” Architizer’s Marc Kushner writes.