(Photo: Jennifer Graylock/AP)

Jann’s New Deal on Meals
No drinking on the job! And no celebrating, either!
Another rock-and-roll perk—the drunken late-night dinner “on Jann”—has gone by the wayside at Wenner Media, home of Rolling Stone and Us Weekly. Company president Kent Brownridge sent around a pre-holiday memo saying that come January 1, the company wouldn’t pay for anything but nice sober breakfasts or lunches. Meals “should not be treated as an ‘entertainment vehicle’ but should be used as an ‘access meal’ ” and deployed by “decision makers only,” it reads, before summing up: “The following meals are not eligible business expenses: meals with the purpose of saying ‘thank you’ or meant to ‘celebrate’ something.” Brownridge says the change didn’t come about after any particular excess: “We sort of had a general creep to the degree to which people were maybe taking a bit of advantage of the policy.” He acknowledges that there’s some unhappiness with it. But times have changed. “There are probably a few people who are single who leave work and like to go out. But we have fewer of them than we had twenty years ago.”

EDITED BY CARL SWANSON

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