Gift Of The Magi: Trades Edition
As usual, C. Nikki is trying to turn what everyone else respectfully regards as sad, inevitable gossip into an EXCLUSIVE. But yes, there is ongoing discussion of The Hollywood Reporter going out of print and Variety going pay wall. Either may or may not happen.
Here is the background – The Hollywood Reporter, after getting slashed by Variety stealing talent – almost all of which has since been jettisoned, less than 2 years later – cut its own narrow throat in the last 6 months by eliminating a lot of its free Academy and other guild subscriptions and publishing fewer tha 20 pages a day on a pretty consistent basis. The entire game of selling Oscar space, which the trades lived and ae now dying on, is the idea that it will be seen by the core of voters. The Hollywood Reporter has made itself unreliable for buyers.
Of course, come the summer, as awards sales for this next season started up, the trade attempted to sell its former self. Not much luck. Moreover, even with print cutbacks, the infrastucture of the trade is too top-heavy.
And here is the greatest irony… the only real asset left, aside from its history, for either trade to exploit as a differentiator from The Web is being a print publication. It Is the only way to raise ad buys beyond the relatively low ad sales prices on the web. Yet it is prohibitively expensive.
Variety is in better shape but is still in serious danger of being reduced to a shadow of its former self. But the idea of closing the internet wall before the Oscar season is over is even more odd than the general conversation of re-closing the wall. Even though Variety would happily give free web access to any Academy member, the problem is that any resistance (“please enter your user name and password”) makes their website one step less attractive to web surfers.
Moreover, closing the pay wall on a narrowly read site like a trade magazine that does almost no investigative journalism and has no must-read columnists is a disaster waiting to happen. Ask yourself, when’s the last time you heard anything about Howard Stern?
There is only one way that Variety can decimate its subscription circulation… by closing the wall and making Hollywood send its publicity – which is the vast majority of what trade reporting is – to every other outlet at the same time or even earlier. We have already seen some publicists and executives choose to break stuff on Finke because of the comfy berth she gives her sources. We have seen “breaking stories” spread between Variety, Finke, the LA Times, etc. In 2009, movie news is not news until it is circulated. And a closed wall means no circulation outside of a very narrow group. And that might work if there was anything that was really exclusive. But none of it is. From aggregators like MCN to specific focus sites like Box Office Mojo to gossips like Nikki and across the wide range of sites out there, we are not in a business where news breaks, but rather is gently placed next to a broken shell so it looks like it escaped.
But I digress…
Anything either trade does before the Oscar season ends is an undeniable signal that that part of their revenue stream is broken in a BIG way. Award Season Print has been the primary revenue for THR for over a decade… if there is no more print, there is no more THR. Flipside, if Variety is narrowing their web presence during the season, they certainly cannot charge MORE for Phase II ads… and it is most likely they would have to charge less. Why would they cut into revenues on purpose? They wouldn’t… unless there wasn;t much revenue there to cut into.
I’m not saying these things will not eventually happen. I called THR’s demise a couple of years ago, so their death march is sad, but not a shock. And Variety has been pulling back for almost a year on almost everything that differentiates them from the rest of the entertainment media, including slashing their review budget. But either move, timed as suggested in Nikki’s EXCLUSIVE, is an even worse sign of trauma than has been anticipated at this time of year.
Yikes. I can’t imagine Variety making users pay to read reviews. I’d wager that quite a lot of their traffic is through review postings on sites like Rotten Tomatoes, Metacritic and fan sites, that post trade reviews because Variety and THR are almost always the first publications of merit to review a given film. Of course, that traffic isn’t coming from Academy voters, but still…
Howard Stern is going to be a perpetual case study in business school in years to come. But a case study of a failed experiment, a cautionary tale, or a bold venture into the future I have no idea. Regardles, he has completely fallen off the face of the Earth. And he threw himself off that cliff; that’s what’s so remarkable. He willingly chose to render himself irrelevant. He chose oblivion. He was paid handsomely to do so; a king’s ransom. But, it’s still oblivion. The King of All Media rules the pettiest of principalities.
Yes, it’s weird. Used to be a HUGE Stern fan and daily listener, but had no interest in buying into satelite radio. I’m sure he’s making a fortune and still has a (smaller) devoted legion of fans, but other than the very occasional Letterman appearance or someone posting a YouTube of some notable interview, I never hear ANYONE talking about him. And I don’t firsthand know anyone who still listens or cares.
I think Stern is the one who’s happy here. And tho a little goes a long way, there’s no doubt his show is the best it’s ever been. He’s free and it shows.
I know a lot of people who listen to Stern every day are think it’s the best the show has ever been. I listened to the show every day when it was free and quite loved it, but can see how getting it off “terrestrial” radio could be the same kind of shot in the arm Artie was after Martling left. I’m sad to not listen to it, I suppose (I’m all audiobooks, all-the-time now), but like someone else suggested, Stern’s probably at his happiest with his current format and if that required losing a great deal of his audience, I’m sure he’s fine with that. Who’s to say the show wouldn’t have gone stale after a few more years without this big switcheroo?
The surest sign that Stern no longer matters came with the Don Imus/”nappy ho” fiasco. I never saw or heard a single quote from Stern, even though he and Imus had been feuding for decades.
I agree also that Variety going back behind the firewall is a recipe for disaster. News can be picked up from a zillion other sites, and while I like some reviewers and columnists, especially McCarthy and Lowry, they’re not worth $150 a year or whatever the tab will be.
My progressive friends who are no Stern fans played me clips from his show a couple weeks back where he outed the hatred against Obama as racism. Carter stole his thunder but…
Come on, Cadavra. There is no way Variety would charge anything close to that sum. Or much more than an LA times subscription, for that matter.
What Variety needs is someone like Finke. Basically, the paper needs to be more controvercial to be relevant.