In July 2012, Los Angeles Times columnist Patrick Goldstein spent a week calling Hollywood and asked an awkward question — where does Variety actually rank now? — and got an awkward answer. The trades had been reordered, and Variety’s century-long presumption of first place was over.
Then
Goldstein’s Big Picture column was running in the LA Times entertainment section that week with a piece on Variety’s status as the trade was reportedly being shopped by Reed Elsevier. He had spent the prior week working his Hollywood contacts to take the trade’s temperature: studio chiefs, marketers, agents, producers, executives. He included an informal poll of about a dozen of these contacts, including a pair of studio chiefs, asking them to rank the four titles by current relevance.
The result was:
- Deadline
- The Hollywood Reporter
- TheWrap
- Variety
The most damning data point in the column wasn’t the ranking. It was the comment from a studio marketer Goldstein quoted on the record: “I only subscribe out of habit. I can’t remember the last time I read anything in the paper when I didn’t already know the information from somewhere else.” A surprising number of Variety subscribers, Goldstein wrote, said the main reason they kept renewing was to keep tabs on the awards-season ads — meaning the ads themselves had become a more important product than the editorial.
Variety film editor Josh Dickey responded on Twitter, defending the trade in real time. The defense was professional. The data, however, had already moved.
Now
Variety was sold by Reed Elsevier to Penske Media Corporation in October 2012, three months after Goldstein’s column. PMC took it down a different path than what Reed had managed: the paywall came down, the print product became less central, the web brand was rebuilt around a year-round scoop model, and the awards-season ad business was preserved as a key revenue line under a more aggressive sales operation. By the late 2010s Variety had clawed back to a competitive position with THR — both inside PMC by 2020 — and the Goldstein ranking from 2012 looks like a snapshot of the bottom of a curve, not a permanent verdict.
Patrick Goldstein himself retired from the LA Times in December 2012, five months after this column. The Big Picture as a Times column went with him. He has subsequently surfaced periodically in op-eds, podcast appearances, and an industry oral-history project, but his weekly Hollywood-watching beat at the paper effectively ended with that retirement.
Josh Dickey moved on from Variety not long after, going to TheWrap, then to Mashable as deputy entertainment editor, and through several senior roles at Yahoo Entertainment and similar consumer-facing properties. The 2012 defense of Variety on Twitter is preserved in the FishbowlLA post; the trade he was defending is, sixteen years later, in a much stronger competitive position than he could plausibly have argued for at the time.
Original report archived on the Wayback Machine: July 2012 snapshot