By Owen Reyes · Republished 2026-05-21 · Originally reported by Pandora Young on FishbowlLA, 2012
Before entertainment news fractured across a hundred websites, a handful of trade-paper bylines defined how Hollywood understood its own music business. Jeffrey Jolson-Colburn was one of them. In June 2012, FishbowlLA marked his death.
Then
Jeffrey Jolson-Colburn, a veteran entertainment journalist, died on June 23, 2012 at his Los Angeles home. He was in his mid-fifties; a cause of death was not reported at the time. News of his death first appeared on Hollywood Today, the website he had founded in 2006.
His reporting career stretched back decades. He covered the music industry for The Hollywood Reporter from the late 1980s into the mid-1990s, a stretch when the trade’s music desk was a genuine power center in Los Angeles. He also worked as a writer and editor at Grammy Magazine, Woodstock and E! Online, and in the mid-1980s launched the short-lived ROCK Magazine — remembered by one former intern as a publication in the spirit of Creem, minus the rabid following.
His sister, Nadine Jolson, said a memorial service was being planned for July 7, 2012.
Now
The beat Jolson-Colburn built a career on has largely vanished in its old form. The dedicated music-trade desks that The Hollywood Reporter and its rivals once maintained were thinned through the 2000s and 2010s as the trades consolidated, repositioned around film and television awards coverage, and absorbed the same online-traffic pressures as everyone else.
Hollywood Today, the site he started in 2006, belonged to the first wave of independent entertainment-news startups that tried to compete with the established trades on speed and access. Most of that wave did not survive the following decade intact.
What remains is the record of a working journalist who spanned print’s most confident years and the early, uncertain internet era — and a reminder of how much institutional memory the entertainment press shed as that generation moved on.
Original report archived on the Wayback Machine.