By Owen Reyes · Republished 2026-05-20 · Originally reported by Richard Horgan on FishbowlLA, 2011
A year into Janice Min’s reinvention of The Hollywood Reporter as a glossy weekly, the LA Business Journal ran the numbers — and FishbowlLA passed along the ones that mattered.
Then
The piece was written by Greg Hernandez, a former Los Angeles Daily News reporter who had recently joined the LA Business Journal as its entertainment and media reporter. He examined the handsome, sometimes ad-thin weekly print edition of The Hollywood Reporter, then in the middle of Min’s expensive relaunch.
Hernandez spoke to both THR editor-in-chief Janice Min and her competitor Sharon Waxman, and surfaced concrete figures: a full-page print ad ran $32,000 and, per Min, was not being discounted; circulation stood at 72,000; and a January issue carrying 24 full pages of advertising looked like an early revenue high-water mark.
Min framed the editorial mission as a refusal of trade-press convention. “There’s no law written into the journalism books that trade stories have to be boring,” she said, describing the weekly cover as ‘brutal’ to choose but central to making industry stories travel to a wider readership.
Now
Min’s glossy gamble defined an era at The Hollywood Reporter, but she left the title in 2014. She went on to lead The Ankler, the Hollywood newsletter that grew under her into a subscription-media company — an outlet built on exactly the bet that industry coverage need not be dull, only now delivered to inboxes rather than a $32,000-a-page print weekly.
The Hollywood Reporter itself passed through several owners and now sits inside the Penske Media–Eldridge joint venture alongside Billboard and Vibe, while Variety and Deadline round out Penske’s trade portfolio. The competitive map Hernandez sketched has consolidated into a near-duopoly of trade ownership.
Sharon Waxman’s TheWrap, the scrappy digital rival quoted as a counterweight in 2011, kept operating as an independent outlet — a reminder that not every challenger from that period was absorbed.
Original report archived on the Wayback Machine.