Media recruiters have been working overtime with the influx of top newsroom jobs that have recently come on the market. Here’s one more to add to the list: I learned over the weekend that Jason Fine, editor of Rolling Stone since 2018, will be moving out of that role effectively immediately. There will now be a wide search for an editor in chief, while two of Fine’s erstwhile deputies, Sean Woods and Jerry Portwood, mind the store in the interim. Fine joined Rolling Stone as an associate editor 24 years ago and steadily climbed the ranks. While I’m told he wasn’t quite working out in the editor’s chair, he’s now got a new gig at Rolling Stone—as director of content development, focusing on film, T.V., podcasts, books and the like.
Fine was named editor of Rolling Stone two and a half years ago as part of a major reboot that also marked a transition of ownership from founder and longtime steward Jann Wenner to new owner Jay Penske, whose Penske Media Corporation also includes Variety, Billboard, WWD, Deadline, and numerous other publications, as well as a stake in The Hollywood Reporter. (PMC reps confirmed the Rolling Stone shuffle when I got ahold of them on Sunday afternoon.) Penske, the 42-year-old son of automotive titan Roger Penske, has emerged as a quietly influential media executive in recent years, albeit one who generally prefers to fly under the radar. Wenner’s son, Gus Wenner, now works for Penske as Rolling Stone‘s president and chief operating officer, and he will be closely involved in scouting for Fine’s successor. (How time flies: when Fine joined the magazine in 1997, Gus was seven years old.)
The changing of the guard at Rolling Stone is the latest ripple in a season of turnover throughout the journalism world, where newsroom leadership is currently in flux at organizations ranging from The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times, to Reuters and ABC News, to Wired, HuffPost and Vox. Rashida Jones recently succeeded longtime MSNBC president Phil Griffin, and CNN chief Jeff Zucker last week told employees that he expects to move on when his contract is up at the end of this year.
Who will be next?
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