In late July 2011 The Hollywood Reporter promoted Erik Pedersen to managing editor, filling the slot vacated by Todd Cunningham’s departure a few months earlier. The masthead at the time listed Michael Barnes as daily managing editor, so Pedersen’s role was the second-managing-editor seat — the production-side editorial overseer who keeps the trade running each day.
Then
Pedersen had been with The Hollywood Reporter for 15 years before the promotion, with previous time at the Orange County Register and the Los Angeles Daily Journal. He had been the copy chief and news editor at THR, and was a Los Angeles native who occasionally moonlighted as a concert reviewer — Jeff Bridges at the Troubadour, Rush at the Forum, the kind of professional-courtesy assignments senior copy desk staff sometimes get to keep their byline alive.
The original FishbowlLA framing didn’t oversell the news: the promotion was internal, the role was managerial rather than visible, and Pedersen was the kind of long-tenured editor who keeps a daily trade publishing on schedule rather than the kind of marquee hire who gets press releases. Todd Cunningham, the predecessor, had left THR earlier in 2011 to move on to other industry roles.
Now
Erik Pedersen continued at THR through much of the 2010s in editorial-operations roles before eventually moving over to Deadline, where he has been a long-tenured editor and reporter through Deadline’s PMC-era growth. His byline has been a consistent presence at Deadline across the late 2010s and into the 2020s, covering theater, awards, and the broader entertainment business.
Todd Cunningham continued in entertainment-business writing through the 2010s, including roles at TheWrap and other consumer-press properties. Michael Barnes — the daily managing editor whose role Pedersen was complementing in 2011 — eventually moved on from THR; the second-managing-editor model that THR was running in 2011 has been replaced by the more streamlined editorial-leadership structures the PMC-era operation runs.
The 2011 promotion looks now like one of the quiet masthead moves that, taken together, kept THR functioning across the e5-to-PMC transition. Pedersen’s eventual move to Deadline — same parent company, different masthead — is itself a marker of how PMC’s consolidation of the trades has internalized what used to be inter-trade migration.
Original report archived on the Wayback Machine: July 2011 snapshot