In late February 2013 The Hollywood Reporter announced Erin Weinger as its new Style Editor on the website side, reporting to culture editor Degen Pener and THR.com editor Chris Krewson. The hire signaled how seriously THR’s Janice Min era was treating style and fashion as a coverage vertical alongside the trade’s traditional film-and-TV beats.
Then
Weinger came to THR from the firm of interior designer Kelly Wearstler, where she had been director of digital content for fashion — a role at the intersection of celebrity, design, and high-end consumer brand work. Before that, she had built a hybrid web-print journalism résumé across multiple lifestyle and entertainment publications.
Degen Pener was THR’s culture editor and had been a key part of the Janice Min relaunch — running coverage that pushed THR beyond pure trade-news into the broader culture-and-style territory that the magazine’s consumer-weekly positioning demanded. Chris Krewson had moved over from Variety in mid-2012 (covered in a separate batch-2 piece) and was running the website operation.
The original FishbowlLA framing was that the Weinger hire fit a clear pattern — Min was systematically building THR.com out vertical by vertical, with named editors for film, TV, music, business, legal, style, and digital news. The breadth of coverage was meant to support the title’s consumer-magazine ambitions and its growing event business (the Power 100 lists, the fashion-and-style events, the awards-season programming).
Now
Erin Weinger continued at THR for years, including through the broader Penske/PMC acquisition of THR in 2020. She subsequently moved into senior fashion-editorial roles at major lifestyle and consumer publications, with continued work at the intersection of celebrity style, design, and consumer brand. The kind of digital-fashion-editor path she traveled — from a designer’s in-house content team to a major entertainment trade’s style desk to subsequent senior roles — became a recognized career trajectory across the 2010s for that type of editor.
Degen Pener has continued at THR in various senior editorial roles through the PMC era. Chris Krewson moved on from THR to a series of digital-editorial leadership positions, most prominently at LION Publishers as a leading voice in independent local-news organizing.
Kelly Wearstler, the interior designer Weinger had been working for in 2013, has continued to be one of the most-bylined design figures in the American luxury-design space — with high-profile hospitality projects (Proper Hotels, Austin Proper, Santa Monica Proper, San Francisco Proper among them) and continued product-design franchises across her sustained brand build.
The style-and-fashion vertical at THR that Weinger’s 2013 hire was meant to operationalize has held up well — it remains one of the more profitable verticals in the trade’s overall content mix, with continued growth in awards-season fashion coverage and ongoing event extensions.
Original report archived on the Wayback Machine: February 2013 snapshot