Pop culture publication Rolling Stone has laid off a handful of editorial staffers, including some of the magazine’s best-known journalists and columnists, as parent company Penske Media works to reduce its headcount and expenses.
The cuts were first reported this week by Oliver Darcy, the former CNN media journalist-turned-newsletter writer. Among those impacted at Rolling Stone are Lisa Tozzi, Rolling Stone’s executive digital director; chief television critic Alan Sepinwall and copy chief Steven Pearl.
“You may have heard that things are tough in media right now. The Grim Reaper has come for a lot of my friends over the last few years, and this week, he came for me,” Sepinwall wrote in a blog post. “I’ve been informed that my time at Rolling Stone is over, effective immediately. I have one online story still to be published, plus a small feature in the November print issue of the magazine, but that’s unfortunately the end of my affiliation with a place I’ve really enjoyed working at for the last seven and a half years.”
The layoffs come as PMC explores ways to shrink its workforce, though the timing has raised speculation about whether Rolling Stone is also recalibrating its editorial direction under new chief executive Julian Holguin. Job postings at the magazine suggest that the brand is actively recruiting for certain roles, even as it issues pink slips across departments.
The reduction also follows a controversial return-to-office mandate across PMC’s portfolio. In August, company owner and CEO Jay Penske announced that starting in October, employees must work on-site at least four days per week at one of the company’s offices or risk termination. PMC maintains operations in Los Angeles, New York, Miami and Austin, but many employees are based elsewhere, having been hired during the pandemic when remote work became the norm.
The company’s guidance has drawn criticism and confusion, particularly at properties that never required in-office attendance, including Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, Billboard, Deadline and Rolling Stone. Penske framed the mandate as an effort to strengthen company culture and productivity, writing in a memo that remote workers were less engaged and less effective. Multiple independent studies since 2020 have found little evidence to support that claim.
The health of Penske’s business came into focus this week when the company filed a lawsuit against Google, arguing that the search giant’s decision to shift toward artificial intelligence-generated summaries caused a precipitous drop in web traffic. Like other publications, Penske’s trades rely on traffic to generate advertising revenue and commissions from sales of products and services.
Penske argued that Google uses the content of its publications to form the foundation of its AI-generated summaries when people look for things related to the media and entertainment industries. Rather than presenting clear links back to Penske’s content, Google repurposes the content into summaries, which gives people the answer to their questions — a move that makes it less likely that Google users will read Penske’s content or otherwise give the company traffic.
