July 20, 2026

HOW HOLLYWOOD LOST THE HOLLYWOOD PRESS:

At a time when the internet-model was already cutting deeply into news media profits, [Nikki] Finke’s strategy [at Deadline.com] was something of a revelation. It’s easy to imagine that the legacy trades, Variety and THR, must’ve looked at what Finke was doing and thought, “we need to be doing that too.” Subscriptions fees were down and Trade ads were fading away. The obvious strategic pivot was to follow Finke’s lead and begin to tailor some coverage for a broader non-Hollywood audience which loved behind-the-scenes Hollywood stories combined with social media snark.

Into this volatile economic mix came deep-pocketed Media Mogul Jay Penske and his Penske Media Corporation who, over the course of about a decade, bought or otherwise assumed control of all three of the most well-known trade papers beginning with Nikki Finke’s Deadline site in 2009, three years after Twitter’s launch and one year before the debut of Instagram.

And with corporate ownership came corporate expectations.

FADE OUT:

SMASH CUT TO: 2026

Today the Hollywood Trade papers are not the same publications they were thirty years ago. To scan the digital home pages of the Trades now is to recall the heady days of clickbait driven sites and their “X destroys Y with this one simple comment” and “You won’t believe what just happened…” story formulations. The modern Trades often lean into stories designed not only to drive clicks, but to go viral on social media, and much of the original purpose of the Trade papers has been subverted.

QED:

I’m old enough to remember when Variety handled the film and TV industry, and Billboard covered the music industry (my dad bought both trade publications every week in the 1970s and ‘80s). This tweet is purely Variety trying to drum up clicks through wading into the culture wars, something it rarely if ever did during the Before Times.

Posted at 8:14 pm by Ed Driscoll