Metro Magazine confirms job cuts, including current editor

Monday, 13 October 2025

Long-running Auckland magazine Metro has confirmed the departure of its editor and three other full-time staff as part of a shake-up first reported by The Post last month.

But the magazine will continue to be published, with outgoing editor Henry Oliver, writing in the latest edition that the publication will be “in new hands, with new ideas about what its role should be”.

He continued: “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.”

Along with Oliver, food editor Charlotte Muru-Lanning, art director Sam Wieck and commercial director Lucy Janisch-Fitzgerald will be leaving the magazine.

The Post understands that Oliver and Muru-Lanning were made redundant and the remaining two chose to resign immediately after.

Metro’s new general manager Julia Barnes confirmed to The Post last month that the magazine was “making changes to protect [its] long-term sustainability”.

However, she did not address questions about a proposed restructure, or whether any roles had been disestablished.

“Print magazines are tough, but we’re committed to Metro’s future,” said Barnes at the time.

Metro’s chairperson Sam Johnson, a projects director at Still, the magazine’s owners, told the NZ Herald that “guest editors” would fill the gap until the “finances [are] back into a position where we can afford full-time staff”.

Former Metro editor Simon Wilson, now a writer for NZ Herald, previously told The Post that removing an editor in favour of guest editors was a “tactic” sometimes used by magazine publishers.

“Before I was at Metro, [the] Metro and North & South editors were made redundant and they had … senior writers in a kind of managerial role where they weren't called editors. That lasted for a little while, and then they made editors again,” he said.

“When I was at Cuisine, I was made redundant from there because they decided … ‘we don't think we need an editor’.”

Metro still had an important role to play in Auckland, he believed.

“I think Henry [Oliver] has done a remarkable job. I think I did a good job in my time, but publishing, the city, media have all moved on - and Henry's moved with them in ways that are, I think, exciting and invigorating,” he said.

Metro is a fixture of news stands in Auckland, having first been published in the early 1980s under the editorship of Warwick Roger, who died in 2018.

The magazine was caught up in the closure of Bauer Media during the Covid-19 pandemic and briefly ceased publication before being rescued by entrepreneur Simon Chesterman and relaunched as a glossy quarterly magazine.

It was again sold in 2023, this time to investment firm Still, a company with an ambitious aim to acquire or launch 100 local businesses in the next decade.

At the time, its chief executive, rich-lister Hideaki Fukutake, described Metro as an important cultural icon in New Zealand.