Hearst Gives Thanks With Layoffs

The Hearst Tower, soon to be a bit less populated by editors. Photo: Mario Tama/Getty Images

At 8 a.m. on November 21, exactly one week before Thanksgiving, Debi Chirichella, president of Hearst Magazines, sent an email to employees: In order to “better position our organization” and “respond to ongoing changes in our industry,” a bunch of them would soon get the ax. Those affected would “receive a private meeting invitation from HR” by 9 a.m.

As 9 a.m. came and went, staffers who didn’t receive a meeting request sighed a breath of relief. But then at 9:35, Chirichella sent another email telling staff that, due to a “technical difficulty,” there was “a delay in the deployment of calendar invites to some impacted employees.”

Some staffers didn’t get an HR meeting invite until an hour or more later. And by then, many already knew, since they couldn’t sign into the company Slack. All told, 192 people were laid off across all categories of editorial, ad sales, product, and PR, according to Zach Lennon-Simon, a senior video editor and co-chair of the company’s union who was laid off in last week’s culling.

No editor-in-chiefs lost their heads — although Elle Decor’s editor Asad Syrkett preemptively quit in September. Especially hit hard were Elle, which lost six people; Harper’s Bazaar, which lost eight (and is also dropping print frequency to nine issues a year from ten), and Cosmopolitan, which let go 11, though this also coincides with the arrival earlier this fall of new editor Willa Bennett, who came over from Highsnobiety (she also oversees Seventeen). She will presumably be making various changes to create her own team; Cosmopolitan fashion director Cassie Anderson has quietly departed the magazine, as Brandon Tan — previously fashion director for GQ, where Bennett used to work — was named fashion director for Cosmo and Seventeen.

After years of downsizing, many Hearst publications were already run by a skeleton crew. Take the onetime supermarket checkout-line powerhouse Woman’s Day, which before the cuts had four people solely devoted to its print product (with others from across Hearst pitching in part-time). Only the editor-in-chief, Meaghan B Murphy, remains. So maybe it makes more sense to call it Just This One Woman’s Day.

The glitchy rollout of the executions made for a particularly cruel process, but Hearst’s cuts don’t exactly come as a surprise. Last year, it had three different rounds of layoffs — in February, July, and November — though none as large as this pre-Thanksgiving massacre. The force behind these moves, I’m told, is Lisa Howard, the global chief revenue officer who joined from the New York Times in October 2022.

And while these cuts are unsurprising, given the humbled state of the once-mighty magazine industry, those left are wondering how exactly this winnowing is going to help create the sort of content people will want to actually pay to subscribe to. Hearst was never as enviably profligate as the old Condé Nast (now reduced to being a brand extension for Anna Wintour), or as Establishment-dude powerful as what was once known as Time Inc. (now sold for parts; most of it is now owned by something called Dotdash Meredith, which also announced layoffs last week). But it kept its costs down and its focus on Middle America with Good Housekeeping and O, the Oprah Magazine until — well, until that didn’t work so well anymore. Joanna Coles made a bid to be some sort of bootleg Tina Brown–Wintour throwback editrix, but she lost out to the content-farm-worker era, which, again, worked until it didn’t. There are titles like Town & Country that still seem somehow to be having some fun, but fun is in short supply in general in the glossy world these days.

And critics of the company’s management are in no short supply. “They’re in the business of chasing trends after those trends have ended and then wondering why they’re not making more money,” the fired union leader Lennon-Simon told me. “The problem is that they are just trying to cut their way into profitability and don’t actually have a strategy for growth,” carped another Hearst insider. “Hearst has forgotten the power and allure of brands and wants the easy route of selling to a low-cost audience,” they added. “Which is the race to the bottom, and is just not going to work.”

On Thursday afternoon, as the HR hangman meetings were underway, the company sent out another email recognizing the difficulty of parting with “colleagues and friends.” But the company had a plan to help them move forward. Fifteen-minute virtual counseling sessions would be available over the next two days. There were no plans to give out free turkeys to soften the blow, however.