Metro magazine loses full-time staff amid financial restructure

Auckland’s lifestyle and current affairs magazine Metro is losing its full-time staff and editor following a major resturcture.

As part of the changes, editor Henry Oliver and food editor Charlotte Muru-Lanning have been made redundant. Art director Sam Wieck and commercial director Lucy Janisch-Fitzgerald have since resigned.

Metro’s publisher Still Group – owned by Japanese-New Zealand businessman Hideaki Fukutake – has confirmed the restructure.

The announcement comes just over a month after The Post’s Stewart Sowman-Lund reported changes were afoot at the magazine. At the time, Still Group refused to comment on the exact proposal.

Metro’s new general manager Julia Barnes told Sowman-Lund that the magazine remained “in the middle” of a “process”.

“With our next issue in production, any public comment right now would be premature as the situation is still evolving,” she said. “Print magazines are tough, but we’re committed to Metro’s future.”

Content you don’t want to scroll through

In an article on NZ Herald’s Media Insider column, Still Group projects director Sam Johnson tells Shayne Currie: “I hope to get the finances back into a position where we can afford fulltime staff. For now, we are engaging guest editors.”

He adds that Barnes will be “taking time to reset Metro as a magazine for more of Auckland.”

“As noted in the publisher’s note, we wish the departing team members well,” Johnson continues. “The business model now has a stronger focus on building and serving the Auckland community, including our subscribers, our advertisers and the hospitality sector.

“Metro will be content you don’t want to scroll through on your phone – focused on print, designed to be read slowly or gifted to someone else.”

End of an era

Oliver has penned a farewell editorial in issue 448, released on October 14, in which he pays tribute to the magazine and three other departing full-time staff.

“The magazine will be in new hands, with new ideas about what its role should be, what form it should take and how it should fit into the life of the city beyond 2025,” Oliver writes.

“I’m sure it won’t be the magazine I’d make, that things will be done in ways I wouldn’t do them, but that’s also true of many of the versions of Metro that came before me.”

A strong legacy

Metro was first published in 1981, established by famous and longest-serving editor Warwick Roger.

Over the years, Metro has showcased generations of Aotearoa’s journalists and writers, including famous gossip columnist Felicity Ferret.

CEO and editor of Dish magazine Sarah Tuck began her career at Metro.

Reflecting on the magazine’s legacy and her time there, she says: “I started when Warwick Roger was at the helm, and I remember feeling like what the magazine was doing was such important work. Long form articles were expected and celebrated, Felicity Ferret was feared and revered and Metro was just incredibly respected and admired.”

Passing the baton

Oliver writes his length of service was “by my count, second only (but a distant one) to that of founding editor Warwick Roger – an honour (or what this magazine might have once called a ‘dubious achievement’).

“I mention only to highlight my hope that I will not keep it. From the next issue onwards, Metro will inevitably be a new and different version of itself, just as it has always been during its reinventions (sometimes by chance, sometimes by the times, sometimes by personnel, sometimes by force) over the years.

“Any publication that lasts 40+ years has to die and be reborn; to shed skin and start again; to find new ways to speak to and about the city; and (I’m afraid it must be said) to work financially in a rapidly changing industry and a struggling economy,” he adds.

Previous uncertainty

Metro previously faced uncertainty in 2020 when German publisher Bauer Media, then owner, suddenly closed its New Zealand operations during the Covid pandemic.

The magazine was bought by entrepreneur Simon Chesterman, who later sold it to Still Group in 2023.

In statement shortly after the acquisition, Fukutake acknowledged Metro’s “significant cultural offering” to Auckland and New Zealand since 1981: “I respect the work of the team and look forward to seeing the magazine grow its cultural reach in Auckland and around New Zealand.”

Looking ahead

Production for the summer and autumn issues is underway, “featuring many of our long-time contributors alongside new voices and creative leadership,” says Johnson in the Herald article.

In a publisher’s note in the latest spring issue, the company notes: “We thank and warmly farewell the Metro full-time staff whose last issue this is. Their legacy remains, and they leave with the high regard of the publisher and shareholder.

“Metro continues as a print-first publication with our pre-Christmas issue already under way. We’ll keep covering what’s happening in Tāmaki Makaurau – the beautiful and the messy, the consequential and the fun – in pieces that are light and serious, long form and pictorial.”

Warm farewell

In his farewell editorial, Oliver talks of his joy in producing Metro as a print magazine.

“I hope not just that Metro will live long into the future, but that there’s still room in the world for things made without algorithms or metrics, for the opportunity for people to pick something up and maybe find something they didn’t know they wanted.

“I hope there’s still room in the world for physical media, for pages to turn, for words and images to collide and together become more than the sum of their parts.”

He says he knew the wind was blowing in the opposite direction and that it was getting stronger: “Still, I hope there’s shelter somewhere. If I’ve got anything, I’ve still got hope.

“Bye x”.

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