In August 2012 The Hollywood Reporter went all-in on the Los Angeles Dodgers, running four different print covers for a single issue — Clayton Kershaw, Magic Johnson and Peter Guber, Tommy Lasorda, and the Mattingly/Kemp/Ethier triple. Daniel Miller’s cover story and Ed Desser’s media-rights sidebar made the case that the new Guggenheim ownership era was going to remake the franchise. Fourteen years later, the verdict is in.
Then
The Guggenheim Baseball Partners group, fronted by Magic Johnson and including Peter Guber, Mark Walter, and others, had bought the Dodgers from Frank McCourt in May 2012 for $2 billion — the largest sports franchise sale in U.S. history at the time. The August THR cover package was the trade’s signature take on what the deal would mean for the team, the city’s sports-media economy, and the upcoming local-TV-rights negotiation that everyone in the deal had been waiting to capture.
Janice Min’s THR was running the four-cover treatment as a stunt. The covers featured Cy Young winner Clayton Kershaw, the new minority owners Magic Johnson and Peter Guber, Hall-of-Famer Tommy Lasorda, and the front-line players Don Mattingly (manager), Matt Kemp, and Andre Ethier. Daniel Miller’s cover story laid out the new ownership’s strategic ambitions; Ed Desser’s sidebar projected the team’s media-rights value at the kind of multibillion-dollar range that would prove conservative.
The original FishbowlLA framing was admiring of the four-cover production stunt as Min-era THR theatricality — the kind of expensive print decision that the magazine was still willing to make in 2012 as a statement of editorial confidence.
Now
The Guggenheim era at the Dodgers turned out to deliver substantially on the financial promise of the 2012 deal. The Dodgers signed a 25-year, $8.35 billion local-TV-rights deal with Time Warner Cable in 2013 that became one of the most lucrative regional-sports-network contracts in U.S. sports history — and also one of the most controversial, because the SportsNet LA carriage disputes meant most LA-area cable subscribers couldn’t watch Dodgers games for the first several years of the deal.
On the field, the Kershaw-era Dodgers became one of the most consistent contending teams of the 2010s, eventually winning the 2020 World Series and the 2024 World Series — Clayton Kershaw remaining the franchise’s iconic pitcher across nearly two decades. Magic Johnson’s role transitioned over time toward business and community engagement. Peter Guber has continued in the ownership group. Mark Walter has been the controlling-financial face of the group throughout.
THR itself was sold to PMC in 2020. The four-cover production-stunt era of trade-press print is something the trades don’t really attempt anymore — partly because print isn’t where the audience is, partly because the volumetric ad economics that supported the stunt no longer add up. The 2012 issue is now a small object lesson in what magazine production could still cost and accomplish at the very last moment before the broader print-trade economics shifted permanently.
Original report archived on the Wayback Machine: August 2012 snapshot