In early October 2012, PMC’s acquisition of Variety from Reed Elsevier was announced. Jay Penske told the LA Times immediately that Nikki Finke would not be involved in running Variety, and that the publication would be operated separately from Deadline.com, though staffers might contribute to both. TheWrap reported that Finke was “having a major tantrum” over the decision.
Then
The acquisition price was modest by entertainment-publishing standards — roughly $25 million for the 107-year-old trade publication that Reed Elsevier had been struggling to monetize behind the paywall it instituted in 2010. PMC’s plan, as Penske outlined: drop the paywall, rebuild the digital operation aggressively, treat Variety as a complement to Deadline rather than a competitor.
The piece that made the inside-trade news was the explicit decision to wall Finke off from Variety. Penske had bought Deadline from Finke in 2009 and kept her running it. The trade-press assumption — including, apparently, Finke’s own — had been that the Variety acquisition would put Finke in charge of both publications. The LA Times-disclosed reality was the opposite: Penske wanted Variety to run independently, to develop its own brand voice, and not to inherit Finke’s deeply combative tone.
The TheWrap insider report — Finke “having a major tantrum” — was Sharon Waxman’s outlet getting the kind of inside-PMC sourcing that the post-Variety-acquisition trade-press ecosystem was already rearranging itself to surface.
Now
The split-management plan held. Variety under PMC’s editorial leadership (eventually Claudia Eller and Andrew Wallenstein as co-editors-in-chief, succeeded by Cynthia Littleton and Michelle Sobrino-Stearns) rebuilt the trade into a competitive digital operation. The paywall came down in 2013. The print product became a less central component of the brand. Variety’s digital traffic ramped back into competitive parity with THR over the subsequent five years.
Nikki Finke left Deadline in 2013 — six months after the Variety acquisition — citing contractual disputes with PMC. The relationship deteriorated through the year, and Finke briefly attempted to launch her own NikkiFinke.com newsletter before health issues curtailed the project. She died in October 2023.
Jay Penske continued as PMC CEO and oversaw the company’s expansion through the rest of the decade — Indiewire, the Hollywood Reporter (2020), Billboard, Rolling Stone, Vibe, IndieWire, SportTechie, and various other entertainment-and-lifestyle publications joining the PMC portfolio. The 2012 Variety acquisition is now visibly the foundational PMC deal — the one that set the strategic template for everything else that followed.
Original report archived on the Wayback Machine: October 2012 snapshot