By Owen Reyes · Republished 2026-05-20 · Originally reported by Richard Horgan on FishbowlLA, 2012
A 2012 Mediabistro interview with Janice Min surfaced a quietly revealing complaint: the editor remaking The Hollywood Reporter found Los Angeles a hard place to staff a newsroom.
Then
FishbowlLA picked up a ‘So What Do You Do…?’ interview that Mediabistro contributor Aria Hughes had conducted with Min. One aside established her relationship with social media — an @janicebmin account existed, but she said she did not use the service and did not know her own password.
The substance was about hiring. Min said THR had grown its staff by 35 to 45 percent, but that recruiting in Los Angeles was genuinely difficult: “There is not a bench out here at all. You struggle to find enough working journalists out here to staff your publication and to even interview.”
Her solution was geographic. Min said the title had leaned on her former home of Manhattan, drawing New York journalists willing to relocate — while still, she added, finding some of the most talented writers in L.A. The full interview lived behind Mediabistro’s AvantGuild members’ paywall.
Now
Min’s diagnosis looks, in hindsight, like a description of a problem she would later help solve from the other side. After leaving The Hollywood Reporter in 2014, she helped build The Ankler into a Hollywood-focused subscription-media company employing exactly the kind of seasoned industry writers she once said L.A. lacked.
The ‘thin bench’ itself was partly a symptom of timing. Min was hiring during the depths of the newspaper-contraction years, when experienced Los Angeles journalists were being shed by shrinking newsrooms; within a few years that displaced talent would scatter into newsletters, trade outlets and digital startups.
The detail about not knowing her own Twitter password is its own period marker. A major editor in 2012 could still treat social media as optional — a posture that became untenable for anyone in her job within just a few years.
Original report archived on the Wayback Machine.