On the Saturday morning of September 29, 2012, Nikki Finke posted a cryptic Deadline advisory: the team wouldn’t provide 24/7 news coverage for at least a week because of “DH business affecting the entire staff in LA, NY and Europe.” Hollywood trade watchers immediately speculated the PMC-Variety acquisition was about to close. They were right.
Then
Finke’s 11:34 a.m. PDT September 29 advisory read: “The Deadline Team won’t provide 24/7 news coverage for at least the next week. One of the reasons is DH business affecting the entire staff in LA, NY and Europe. As a result, we’ll probably miss some breaking stories and delay monitoring some comments, emails and phone calls. Please cut us some slack for the duration.”
The phrasing — “DH business” — was Deadline-internal speak for company strategic events. Chris Krewson (now at THR, formerly at Variety) and Peter Kafka were among the trade watchers who tweeted speculation that the PMC-Variety deal had closed or was about to. The original FishbowlLA framing flagged the same reading: cryptic stand-downs by Finke in 2012 had a track record of preceding major corporate news at PMC.
The post also noted PMC’s Soho House West Hollywood bash scheduled for Monday October 1 — the kind of corporate-celebration timing that fit with a closed acquisition. FishbowlLA’s framing was that if the Variety deal was indeed about to be announced, the Soho House event was the natural venue for it.
Now
PMC’s acquisition of Variety from Reed Elsevier was announced October 9, 2012 — ten days after the Finke advisory — for roughly $25 million. The deal closed shortly afterward. PMC’s strategy: drop the Variety paywall, rebuild the digital operation, integrate the trade into the growing PMC entertainment-publication portfolio alongside Deadline (acquired 2009).
Variety was the foundational PMC acquisition of the 2010s. Subsequent PMC entertainment-business deals — Indiewire, the Hollywood Reporter and Billboard (2020), Dick Clark Productions, Sportico, and the various other PMC properties added through the decade — followed the same playbook: buy distressed or under-monetized entertainment-media brand, restructure, rebuild around an open-web digital strategy, monetize via events and subscriptions. By 2026 PMC is the dominant entertainment-trade publisher globally.
Nikki Finke left Deadline in 2013, less than a year after the Variety acquisition she had publicly opposed (in private and eventually publicly). Her relationship with Jay Penske deteriorated through the year; she eventually wrote that the acquisition would lead to Variety layoffs (it did, in March 2013). She died in October 2023. Jay Penske has continued as PMC’s CEO through the entire interval and has expanded the company into one of the largest entertainment-media operations in the U.S.
The September 29 advisory looks now like one of the small documented moments — alongside the BlogDogger feature, the Krewson hire at THR, the Brooks hire from Indiewire — that captured the trade-press world in the final weeks before PMC’s consolidation began in earnest.
Original report archived on the Wayback Machine: September 2012 snapshot