#Men’s Journal to share top editor with Star amid furloughs: sources

Layoffs continue to plague the media empire behind the National Enquirer, where the head of Men’s Journal will be furloughed on Friday and the guy replacing him will also head up celebrity title Star.

Micah Abrams, editor-in-chief of the health and adventure magazine founded by Jann Wenner in 1992, is among the dozen or so A360 Media staffers who have been told they will stop getting paid effective Nov. 20. — marking the company’s third round of furloughs since the pandemic began.

Replacing Abrams will be James Heidenry, former editor-in-chief of beer-and-babes magazine Maxim who’s more recently been editor-in-chief of several celeb magazines, including Us Weekly, OK! and Star, where he is currently.

But in taking over the six-times-a-year men’s lifestyle magazine, Heidenry’s not getting out of his demanding job at the head of Star, a popular weekly publication, these people added.

Heidenry will soon be the third person to act as Men’s Journal top editor in just nine months — although the first to do it while simultaneously running a magazine focused on Kim Kardashian and makeup tips.

Abrams — formerly a vice president of staff of AMI’s Adventure Sports Network, which ran the sports mags — only stepped into the EIC job in February after Greg Emmanuel was laid off in preparation for the title being moved to new offices on the other side of the country.

As The Post has previously reported, Men’s Journal went through a tremendous upheaval in February when the entire editorial staff was pink-slipped in anticipation of it being merged with Transworld Snowboarding and other sports titles as part of a cost-savings effort that moved the magazine from New York City to Carlsbad, Calif.

And while its getting cut down to size yet again, Men’s Journal appears to be the only magazine in A360’s Carlsbad offices that will have survived the pandemic.

Following layoffs and pay cuts in late March, the company instituted a drastic round of furloughs in September at its New York-based celebrity titles, including the National Enquirer and Us Weekly. Then in October it announced plan to put its sports titles on “pause.”

Staffers at magazines like Bike and Surfer were told the furloughs were effective immediately, while a handful of employees who worked on Powder, Snowboarder and Transworld Skateboarding were granted a reprieve until Nov. 20. Those magazines, however, will also go on indefinite pause position after putting out winter issues.

It all comes against a backdrop of financial upheaval at the company formerly known as American Media. In a surprise shakeup in August, Chatham Asset Management, the hedge fund headed by Anthony Melchiore that controlled American Media when it was run by David Pecker, acquired the publisher and its estimated $400 million in long-term debt into its wholesale distribution company, Accelerate 360.

Pecker at that time was demoted to an “executive advisor” within the new parent company but sources say he has remained very active in decisions in the magazine wing, which was renamed A360 Media.