In early April 2012 The Hollywood Reporter promoted Eriq Gardner — the prolific contributor behind THR’s Hollywood, Esq. legal column — to the full-time senior editor role, partly to fill the New York gap created by Georg Szalai’s move to London. Gardner had been with the publication since 2007. The promotion turned what had been a freelance entertainment-law beat into a permanent senior masthead position.
Then
Hollywood, Esq. had become one of THR’s most-cited columns — the go-to source for everything from Aereo and Megaupload copyright cases to talent-agency lawsuits, studio defamation suits, and the legal mechanics of the entertainment business. Gardner had been doing the work as a contributor since 2007, but the volume and reliability of the column had made the freelance-to-staff conversion an obvious move under Janice Min’s THR.
The original FishbowlLA framing was that THR’s legal coverage had become a structural advantage over the other trades — none of which had a dedicated legal-affairs writer at Gardner’s level of productivity. The Szalai-to-London move had created an opportunity for a quiet masthead reorganization, and Gardner got promoted into it.
Matthew Belloni, who was THR’s executive editor at the time and the lawyer-turned-journalist who had originally hired Gardner as a contributor, was the architect of the Hollywood, Esq. franchise. The 2012 promotion was as much a Belloni decision as a Min one.
Now
Eriq Gardner continued at THR for years afterward, building Hollywood, Esq. into one of the most-cited entertainment-law columns in the industry. He eventually left THR for Puck, the newsletter co-founded in 2021 by his longtime collaborator Matthew Belloni, where Gardner now runs the legal-affairs vertical called The Process. The Belloni-Gardner editorial partnership that started at THR in 2007 has now operated across THR, Variety (where Belloni was briefly editor), and Puck.
Matthew Belloni left THR in 2017 to become a partner at Wondery and then co-founded Puck in 2021 alongside Jon Kelly. Puck’s named-byline-subscription-newsletter model represented the most significant break from the legacy-trades structure of the 2010s — and Belloni’s What I’m Hearing newsletter became one of the most-cited inside-Hollywood properties of the early 2020s.
Georg Szalai, whose departure to London created the 2012 opening Gardner filled, is now Executive Editor at THR. The legal-column franchise that Gardner built at THR continues under a different writer; the original Hollywood, Esq. brand has effectively migrated with Gardner to Puck. The 2012 promotion looks now like the moment Belloni and Gardner started building the team that would, a decade later, leave the trades entirely.
Original report archived on the Wayback Machine: April 2012 snapshot