Penske Media FAQ

Pros

I come to work each day knowing I have the autonomy to get things done & to make a difference. Employees are encouraged to share their ideas and suggestions and are given the ability to put them in motion.

Cons

Employee benefits are more expensive than other places I have worked.

Advice to Management

Continue listening to the ideas of the employees who strive to make PMC a great place to work.

Pros

- nice offices - prestigious publications - interesting people

Cons

- lack resources for people on the creative side (to the extent it made it difficult to perform our jobs) - low salary and little to no work life balance - insists no room for promotions but is happy to promote white male executives near constantly - health insurance super expensive - no diversity and despite efforts to address that (after employees demanded it in full force) nothing changed - executives despite being out of touch do not see their employees as people worthy of having an opinion despite it usually being in their best interest (make their publication not sound tone deaf, racist, sexist, etc.) and are inflexible when it comes to evolving with the times it's exhausting - not an environment for anyone to ever express their opinions or concerns - HR is the worst I have ever had to deal with—not helpful, any concerns you raise will be forwarded to the top, just not good at their jobs

Advice to Management

- pay people more especially creatives - work on your diversity problem - foster an environment for actual dialogue especially when it comes to your conceited out of touch white males at the top - actually work to promote work life balance - get people in HR who actually know how to foster a healthy work environment

Pros

A growing media company...a rarity these days. Some iconic brands. Great coworkers and teammates - made the long hours and High-five meetings a lot more bearable. It was great for the first year after acquisition - we were the shiny new toy. The honeymoon faded after that year.

Cons

Completely disorganized structure. Each brand seems to operate in a complete silo - I never knew what the other brands were up to even if we worked on the same floor. "Corporate" is rarely in person in NY - they seem like the almighty Oz. Never to be seen but all powerful. The company tells us about how profitable PMC is during town halls...yet benefits are marginal at best. We just got 401k matching and it's a paltry 1%. A company who espouses the importance of independent journalism...and then takes money from Saudi Arabia. HR. Is their only role to play bowling and Halloween parties? Maybe a process for employee reviews would be better use of time?

Pros

- Good location in LA with a nice physical work environment (open floor plan, shared kitchen and dining area, comfortable fish bowl conference rooms).

Cons

- PMC appears to be a company that doesn't value or invest in its employees in any meaningful way - Salary is low across the board and as a hiring manager, I saw the company consistently low-ball candidates or hire more junior positions than needed to save money - No matching 401K offered to employees - Minimal paid time off. In fact, the company combines sick days and vacation into a single PTO pool of hours, so if you get the flu and have to take off, you get fewer vacation days that year. The PTO total is pretty low to begin with, so it's difficult to accrue enough vacation even after 2 years to take a simple vacation that lasts more than a couple of days. - There is no performance evaluation program - no annual review, no career progression, no mentoring or coaching. - There is no program in place to give annual raises, bonuses, or rewards of any kind. On my team, no one had received a single raise of any kind in over 2 years. - Managers get no training or guidelines on how to manage their direct reports. There isn't even a requirement for managers to ever meet with their direct reports, ever. Most other companies require or encourage weekly 1:1s. - The corporate leadership and leadership of individual business units were completely out of sync with one another, resulting in a fractious, schizophrenic strategic plan. PMC leaders insisted that digital growth was the #1 priority, for example, while the publication I was at had senior managers who didn't understand or care about digital and instead doubled down on a declining print business. - PMC seems to want to treat all of its business units the same. For example, they had moderate success with Variety by increasing digital production volume, so they naively and uncritically pushed that same strategy on Robb Report, a luxury brands that cannot scale in the same way. - This reveals a bigger problem: PMC hasn't demonstrated it understands the publishing business at all. It has grown entirely through mergers and acquisition -- ie, by buying distressed publications at a discount. It's unclear if they can actually be successful over the long term by growing businesses organically.

Advice to Management

Get your act together. Value your employees and treat them with respect and establish mature HR systems to grow and reward them. Simultaneously, figure out what your overall business strategy is and get your business units on board to execute against that.

Pros

The Product, Engineering, Project team is one that really cares about each other as people and helps each other grow. There is a structured career ladder, so you know what is expected of you at your current role and what you need to be doing to get to the next level. There is a never-ending supply of work to be done, which leads to tough decisions needing to be made, but the team rallies to make those decisions and support each other to ensure we are successful.

Cons

The LA office seems to be the favored son. The people in that office get +1s for the Halloween party, in-office massages, and they removed the half-day for NYE which is really hard with the NYC office being close to Times Square. Remote employee benefits are minimal.

Advice to Management

All the benefits of being in the LA office should be available for the other offices or for remote employees.