Updated 2/13/18 at 5:07 pm EST.
A month after laying off 150 employees inherited through its acquisition of Rodale, Hearst Magazines is undergoing another round of cuts.
Hearst did not respond to a request for comment, but a source close to the company tells Folio: that at least 50 employees were notified Monday of their termination, effective immediately, and that the layoffs appear to have continued into Tuesday.
Employees at the company’s Emmaus, Pennsylvania offices—which had served as Rodale’s headquarters prior to the company’s acquisition by Hearst, finalized last month—were given the news in meetings with HR representatives, who informed them that the acquisition had resulted in their positions being eliminated.
Another source close to the situation describes the severance packages as “generous” and says employees will continue to receive benefits into the summer, but described the layoffs in the Emmaus office as a “clean sweep.”
This latest round of layoffs is separate from the 145 former Rodale staffers who were notified of their impending termination in January. Those individuals are expected to be out by March 10.
This week’s layoffs are not confined to Emmaus, and the company’s New York operations are also impacted. An updated WARN notice issued to the New York State Department of Labor indicates that 84 of the 200 employees located in Rodale’s Midtown Manhattan office are to be terminated by May, although it’s unclear how many of those were already part of the earlier round of cuts last month.
Days prior to that development, Hearst had unveiled its plans for integrating much of Rodale’s editorial and business-side leadership, including transferring Men’s Health, Women’s Health, and Prevention from Emmaus to New York, restoring advertising sales to Prevention, and swapping out Women’s Health editor-in-chief Amy Keller-Laird for Liz Plosser, and Men’s Health editor-in-chief Matt Bean for an editor-to-be-named (in the meantime, Dave Zinczenko has returned to Men’s Health as interim editorial director).
One source adds that this week’s round of cuts comes as a surprise to the remaining employees in Emmaus, many of whom were told, after surviving January’s layoffs, that their positions would eventually be transferred to Hearst Tower in Midtown Manhattan.
This is a developing story.
