After a more than three-month search, Meredith announced that Mary Margaret is the new editor in chief of Entertainment Weekly, the 31-year-old consumer publication devoted to Hollywood and pop culture.
Her appointment comes after the sudden exit last November of EW’s previous EIC, J.D. Heyman, amid reports that staffers had complained of a hostile workplace under his leadership.
Margaret, 36, most recently worked at HubSpot, a sales-software platform where she was senior director of product marketing. Prior to that, she briefly led product content strategy teams for Facebook’s entertainment products and was Roku’s first editorial director for almost two years.
She started her journalism career at Newsweek’s London bureau before moving into senior roles at Parade and People, where she oversaw music coverage and front of the book. Also at People (now owned by Meredith) she helped launch projects melding commerce and content including the publication’s ones to Watch franchise, its ecommerce site, and People and EW’s branded-content studio.
Margaret is set to start as EW’s new EIC on April 12, reporting to Dan Wakeford, editor in chief of People and Meredith’s editorial director of entertainment. She expects to relocate from Dublin to L.A., where EW is based, in the next few weeks.
“As the brand’s first female EIC, as an Asian woman, and as someone who has enjoyed a career in both media and tech, it’s important to me that we represent the richness and variety of storytelling, from the storytellers and the stories to the different mediums we experience those stories through,” Margaret said in a statement provided by Meredith.
She added, “In this unprecedented time, we’ve all been thankful for those moments of delight — a show, a song, a book, a movie — that helped us connect, dream, have a laugh or have a good cry.”
Doug Olson, president of Meredith Magazines and GM of the company’s National Media Group, said Margaret “has the perfect combination of entertainment-insider expertise, business acumen, multimedia knowledge and creativity to continue EW’s legacy as the leading authority in entertainment.”
Entertainment Weekly launched in 1990. Despite its name, the mag isn’t a weekly anymore: EW reduced its print frequency to monthly as of July 2019, when Heyman (formerly deputy editor at People) was named EIC. Meredith picked up Entertainment Weekly through the $2.8 billion acquisition of Time Inc.
EW has a print circulation of 1.5 million and a combined audience of more than 29 million across digital platforms, according to Meredith.
