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Stephen Randall, the longtime deputy editor in Los Angeles for Playboy magazine, will transition to an editor-at-large role, effective with the March 2016 issue. Randall has overseen the Playboy Interview for a much of that time. Here's what the magazine is sending out:
Over the course of his 34-year career at Playboy, Randall has made innumerable contributions to the magazine, most notably of which include the oversight and editing of the renowned Playboy Interview. For the past 25 years, he has brought nearly 300 of the most noteworthy names in politics, academia, the business world and Hollywood to the magazine’s pages, including Dick Cheney, Tom Cruise, Stephen Colbert, Google’s Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Tina Fey, Oliver Stone, Ben Affleck, John Mayer, Helen Thomas, Gary Oldman, Sean Hannity, Jennifer Lopez, Bill Gates, Bernie Sanders, and Ai Weiwei.
Randall has also overseen much of the magazine’s award-winning editorial content during his tenure, including a variety of articles and features by journalists such as Jimmy Breslin, James Franco, Mark Leyner, BJ Novak, George Lois, Betty Friedan, Camille Paglia, Ray Bradbury, EL Doctorow and Ken Kesey.
He will continue to reside in Los Angeles, and is currently in the process of finishing a book for HarperCollins.
At Deadline Hollywood, Mike Fleming has a more personal and real-world take on it.
As cutbacks continue to change for the worse the print newspapers and magazines we grew up with, here’s a changing of the guard that hits close to home for me. Stephen Randall, the longtime Deputy Editor and 34-year veteran of Playboy magazine, is out. He has a title, editor-at-large, but that seems ceremonial, and for Hollywood this is significant because it ends his 25-year run as editor of The Playboy Interview. He has steered that important venue since December 1990 and Jay Leno.I am not objective here: I have been lucky enough to write maybe two dozen of these lengthy Q&As for Randall, covering just about all of the actors and directors I wanted to have long conversations with. I’m still on the masthead as a Contributing Editor, though I haven’t done one since I sat with Ben Affleck for the magazine’s 60th anniversary issue. Co-running Deadline is too time consuming, and I’ve moved the longform interviews here. But this will come as a wallop to many. Randall had the trust of the gatekeeper publicists who expose their clients to sit-downs, hoping they’ll get a fair shake and be allowed to reveal themselves in a format that allowed for thoughtful, serious conversation. It gives me pause to wonder about the future of an iconic magazine feature in a world obsessed not by longform articles but the ADD click-bait gotcha stuff that seems so prized in the digital age.
There are more changes brewing at Playboy, Fleming says: "Randall’s exit closely follows that of Jimmy Jellinek, who was Editorial Director and Chief Content Officer and left a few weeks ago."
