In late March 2012 The Hollywood Reporter announced that New York bureau chief Georg Szalai was relocating to London as the trade’s international business editor. The move signaled where Janice Min’s THR was investing in coverage — the cross-border entertainment business — and it positioned the title for the streaming-era international story that was about to dominate.
Then
Szalai’s new London brief reunited him with senior staff member Stuart Kemp and put him in close contact with THR’s existing international contributor network — Scott Roxborough in Cologne, Deborah Young in Rome. Min’s announcement framed Szalai as “a first-rate business reporter whose breadth of knowledge and relationships on Wall Street remain an asset,” and explicitly tied the London posting to THR’s ambition to expand internationally as the global market became “increasingly important to Hollywood and the entertainment industry.”
The original FishbowlLA framing identified the strategic stakes: posting a senior business reporter to London at a time when London was the financial center for European entertainment capital flows was the kind of long-cycle bet most American trades weren’t making in 2012.
Now
Szalai stayed in the international business editor role at THR for years and remained one of the trade’s most-bylined senior reporters across the decade. He has continued at THR through the 2020 PMC acquisition and is now Executive Editor at THR — the masthead title he has held through PMC’s broader consolidation of the trades.
Stuart Kemp continued in international roles at THR and other entertainment publications. Scott Roxborough has been a long-tenured international correspondent across multiple outlets including THR and Deutsche Welle. The international-business editorial framework that Szalai’s 2012 London posting helped build is now substantially larger — global content rights, cross-border streaming deals, and the financialization of entertainment IP are now front-of-book business stories rather than a specialty niche, and most of the senior reporters covering that beat went through some version of the Szalai-style international rotation.
Janice Min left THR in 2017 and eventually co-founded The Ankler newsletter with Richard Rushfield. THR is now a PMC title. The “global market becomes increasingly important to Hollywood” thesis Min articulated in 2012 turned out, of course, to be exactly the streaming-era trajectory — Netflix, Amazon, Apple, Disney+, Max, and Paramount+ all competing on international content rights pretty much determined the second half of the 2010s and the first half of the 2020s in entertainment-business reporting.
Original report archived on the Wayback Machine: March 2012 snapshot