By Owen Reyes · Republished 2026-05-16 · Originally reported by Richard Horgan on FishbowlLA, July 2011
In late July 2011, FishbowlLA covered a piece of trade-press inside baseball: a reported internal memo at Prometheus Global Media — parent of The Hollywood Reporter, Adweek, and Billboard — said CEO Richard Beckman was giving up day-to-day duties, and the press read it as a soft demotion. Beckman pushed back. The original framing tracked the reporting tug-of-war.
Then
The New York Post, citing an internal memo, reported that Prometheus Global Media CEO Richard Beckman was handing day-to-day managerial responsibilities to chairman Jimmy Finkelstein. The official framing was a focus shift — Beckman moving to concentrate on a new branded-entertainment unit — but the Post, with help from unnamed insiders, read the move as a likely prelude to Beckman stepping away from the CEO post entirely.
Beckman publicly disputed that reading. Reached for follow-up by TheWrap, he insisted flatly that he was, and would remain, the company’s CEO. The TheWrap piece was co-bylined by Sharon Waxman and Lucas Shaw, a former intern who had become one of the outlet’s media reporters.
The story was less about any single fact than about the reporting contest itself: a tabloid’s insider-sourced insinuation set against an executive’s on-the-record denial — the kind of he-said-they-said over a media company’s leadership that the trade press tracked closely.
Now
Prometheus Global Media did not last long under that name. It was renamed Guggenheim Digital Media, and its entertainment titles changed hands repeatedly: The Hollywood Reporter and Billboard ultimately landed, by way of the Valence Media / MRC reorganization, under the Penske Media umbrella, while Adweek was sold off separately. Richard Beckman did, in time, leave the company.
Jimmy Finkelstein went on to a notable second act in media ownership — he bought the Washington political-news outlet The Hill in 2012 and owned it until selling to Nexstar in 2021.
The 2011 item reads now as a snapshot of the unstable ownership era of the entertainment trades — a period of memos, denials, and shifting executive titles, before the Penske consolidation eventually gave those titles a more durable corporate home.
Original report archived on the Wayback Machine.