In late March 2013, Variety film editor Josh Dickey — whose career FishbowlLA had been tracking for years — accepted the managing editor role at TMZ.com. Nikki Finke once again broke the Variety-internal news on Deadline. The exit fit a clear pattern: senior Variety editorial talent was leaving in the post-PMC-acquisition months.
Then
Dickey had been Variety’s film editor through the entire 2010-2012 paywall-and-Showblitz era. He had been the editorial face of the BlogDogger watchdog feature, the on-record defender of Variety against the Goldstein 2012 trades-ranking column, and one of the longest-tenured film-news voices at the trade. His move to TMZ was a sharp pivot — from prestige trade journalism into celebrity-news consumer media — that registered as a significant talent loss.
Finke’s brief Deadline dispatch covering the move was characteristically barbed: she noted that Dickey “will become TMZ’s managing editor after giving his notice at Variety where he was film editor,” and folded in additional inside-Variety news that “Variety’s New York editor Jill Goldsmith was let go on March 8th.” The framing put Dickey’s voluntary exit and Goldsmith’s involuntary one in the same paragraph — a structural reading of the post-PMC Variety as a publication shedding senior talent on multiple fronts.
The original FishbowlLA framing connected the moves to the broader March 2013 Variety layoffs that Finke had pre-announced in January (covered in a separate batch-2 piece). Dickey, in this reading, was reading the corporate weather and jumping voluntarily before the involuntary cuts hit film coverage.
His pit-bull reporter Jeff Sneider had already left Variety. Sneider would go on to launch The InSneider newsletter, one of the more-read entertainment-scoop subscription products of the 2020s.
Now
Josh Dickey’s TMZ tenure was relatively brief in the context of his subsequent career. He moved from TMZ to TheWrap as deputy editor, then to Mashable as deputy entertainment editor, then through multiple senior editorial roles at Yahoo Entertainment and similar consumer-facing properties across the rest of the 2010s and into the 2020s. The trajectory landed him squarely in the consumer-entertainment-news space rather than the trade-press establishment.
Jeff Sneider became one of the most-cited entertainment-scoop bylines in the newsletter era. The InSneider newsletter, which he founded in 2021, has built a substantial paid-subscriber base on the same scoop-first reporting style he and Dickey developed at Variety a decade earlier. The Sneider-newsletter model is now a recognized career path for trade-press editorial veterans.
Jill Goldsmith continued in entertainment-business writing after her March 2013 Variety departure, including reporting work at Deadline (where she eventually landed) and other entertainment-trade properties. The PMC-era trades have, over the past decade, hired back many of the people the 2013 layoffs let go — a slow rebuilding of the senior reporter base that the immediate post-acquisition cuts had reduced.
Nikki Finke died in October 2023. The 2013 Dickey-to-TMZ move now reads as one of the markers of how PMC’s consolidation of the trades reshaped where senior editorial talent could go — toward consumer-celebrity coverage on one end, toward independent newsletters on the other, and away from the traditional middle-trade-publication careers that had defined the previous generation.
Original report archived on the Wayback Machine: March 2013 snapshot