In August 2011 the most-discussed entertainment-trade story wasn’t an exclusive — it was a paywall problem. Variety was breaking film news daily that nobody was citing because the URLs were locked. The trade tried to solve it with a free shadow site called Showblitz. The fix didn’t work, the underlying problem did, and the title eventually solved both by reversing the original decision.
Then
The 2011 trade landscape that this post was reporting from looked like this: Deadline, The Hollywood Reporter, and TheWrap were all running on the open web, all chasing the same studio sources, and all benefiting from the link economy — when one of them broke a story, the others rewrote it within the hour and the original got cited and traffic-credited in the rewrite. Variety, on the same studio beat for 106 years, had a paywall, and that paywall was breaking its position in the news cycle.
The trade’s response was Showblitz.com, a free site that surfaced Variety’s film exclusives in a no-paywall form. Variety film editor Josh Dickey, who had himself come from one of the open-web competitors, was the editorial face of the experiment. The problem, as the original FishbowlLA reporting noted: Showblitz wasn’t indexed in Google News. Without Google News inclusion, the rewriters and aggregators couldn’t see the headlines surfacing, and Variety’s exclusives stayed quietly invisible.
By FishbowlLA’s count from a single week that summer, Variety had landed roughly two dozen film exclusives — Albert Finney and Joan Allen in negotiations for The Bourne Legacy, Kevin Bacon eyeing the antagonist role opposite Jeff Bridges and Ryan Reynolds in R.I.P.D., the kind of casting news that under Deadline’s URL would have done five-figure traffic and reverberated for a day. Under the Showblitz URL, with no Google News pickup, the same news landed in a hole.
Now
Variety dropped the paywall in 2013. Penske Media Corporation had purchased the title in October 2012, and PMC’s broader strategy — open web, ad and event-supported, premium products on top — was incompatible with the locked-URL model. The Showblitz experiment ended; the underlying problem evaporated.
In the years since, PMC has acquired Variety’s onetime competitors as a portfolio. Deadline became PMC in 2009, before this post was even written. The Hollywood Reporter, along with Billboard, came over in a deal completed in 2020. TheWrap remained independent under Sharon Waxman and continues to operate. The trade-press competition that Richard Horgan wrote about every week in 2010 and 2011 has become, on three of the four titles, a corporate-strategy question handled inside one office in West Hollywood.
Josh Dickey moved from Variety to TheWrap to Mashable’s deputy entertainment editor role, and has spent the years since in senior editorial positions at streaming-era outlets — most recently at Yahoo Entertainment and similar consumer-facing properties. The film exclusives keep being broken — the bylines and the URLs and the paywalls keep moving. The 2011 question was who would adapt fast enough to keep their breaks visible. The answer in the end was almost everybody, eventually, by ownership consolidation rather than by paywall engineering.
Original report archived on the Wayback Machine: August 2011 snapshot