In mid-October 2012, Playboy deputy editor Stephen Randall wrote a humorous LA Times op-ed about the just-closed PMC-Variety acquisition, framing it as a love match between the two trade properties. The piece was lightly satirical. Six months later, half of the marriage was suing for divorce.
Then
Randall had been at Playboy for a long time — long enough, as Horgan’s framing went, that “when the current deputy editor first started at the magazine, [Finke] was in her late twenties and in the middle of a brief marriage to attorney Jeffrey W. Greenberg.” That kind of trade-press deep memory was the kind of writing Randall specialized in.
The op-ed itself read the Variety-Deadline acquisition as the kind of consolidation that the entertainment-press industry had been telegraphing for years — Nikki Finke and Jay Penske, separately controlling Deadline and Variety, now in functional partnership; the implication being that the two trade brands would settle into a duopoly with The Hollywood Reporter as the remaining competitor, until PMC came for that too. Randall’s tone was light, the love-match conceit was a writing device, and the underlying analysis was actually substantive.
The original FishbowlLA framing was an admiring pickup — Randall was one of the writers FBLA reliably surfaced when he wrote about trade-press dynamics — and noted that the LA Times publishing him on the topic was itself a marker of how seriously the city’s flagship paper was taking the consolidation story.
Now
The love match Randall wrote about lasted in functional form for several years. Variety’s PMC era stabilized through the mid-2010s under Penske ownership; the editorial team grew; the digital brand was rebuilt; the trade caught back up to THR competitively. The eventual acquisition of THR in 2020 made PMC the dominant entertainment-trade publisher, with three of the four major trades under one corporate roof.
The marriage component the op-ed leaned into didn’t survive Nikki Finke’s tenure at Deadline. By early 2013 — three months after Randall’s piece — Finke was publicly criticizing PMC’s plans for Variety layoffs (covered in a separate batch-2 post). By the end of 2013 she had left Deadline entirely. The Variety-Deadline operational marriage continued, but Finke’s role in it ended within a year of Randall’s op-ed.
Stephen Randall continued at Playboy through additional editorial changes at the magazine, including the brand’s relaunch and various subsequent corporate transitions. He has remained a steady contributor to media-and-cultural-criticism writing across the past decade. The Playboy-deputy-editor perch he was writing from in 2012 is a different role now than it was then — Playboy itself has been through bankruptcy, restructuring, a creator-economy pivot, and multiple ownership transitions.
The 2012 op-ed reads now as one of the small documented artifacts of the PMC consolidation as it was being absorbed by the broader LA-media community — a moment when the trade-press world was still treating the acquisition as a story to be analyzed rather than as the corporate fait accompli it has since become.
Original report archived on the Wayback Machine: October 2012 snapshot