The single hire that announced Janice Min’s intention to remake The Hollywood Reporter wasn’t a deputy editor or a publisher — it was Kim Masters, brought in as Editor-At-Large with her KCRW show kept intact. Sixteen years later, that show is the durable thing.
Then
When Janice Min became editorial director of the 80-year-old Hollywood Reporter in mid-2010, the trade had spent the better part of a decade looking like a building permit looking for a building. The owner was e5 Global Media. The voice was a daily print sheet that nobody outside the studios read by lunch. Min’s first move signaled what she actually wanted the title to do.
She hired Kim Masters away from The Daily Beast and let her keep hosting The Business, the weekly entertainment-industry interview show on public radio. The press release ran the boilerplate — “invaluable asset,” “iconic brand,” the usual — but the real news was structural: an Editor-At-Large title attached to a working byline, with a podcast deal grandfathered in. That was a 2020s newsroom org chart sketched in 2010.
Masters arrived as someone with NPR years behind her, contributing editorships at Vanity Fair and Time on the résumé, and two industry books on the shelf — The Keys to the Kingdom, about Michael Eisner’s Disney, and Hit & Run, co-authored with Nancy Griffin, about Jon Peters and Peter Guber’s Sony era. Min got a deeply sourced studio reporter who didn’t need to be taught the players.
Now
Janice Min’s THR run reshaped the trade — the masthead grew, the print product got a glossy front-of-book, awards-season coverage became a year-round operation. She left in 2017 and eventually launched The Ankler with Richard Rushfield, which is now one of the more-read paid entertainment newsletters and recently picked up Puck-adjacent comparisons in industry coverage. THR itself has been through several ownership turns since the e5 days — Penske Media’s PMC took control in the late 2010s, and the title now sits inside the same building as Variety and Deadline. The trades-as-competitors framing that Owen and the old Fishbowl loved to write about is largely over; today it’s mostly trades-as-portfolio.
Kim Masters, for her part, never left The Business. She still hosts it at KCRW, and the show is one of the few entertainment-press institutions in town that has outlasted its parent reorg, its host’s day-job employer, and the broader collapse of the format around it. Her reporting on Disney, Warner Bros., and the streaming-era studio shakeups continues to land in THR alongside the broadcast work. The 2010 hire was, in retrospect, the rare org-chart decision that aged into a long bet that paid.
Original report archived on the Wayback Machine: June 2010 snapshot