This came from “Vic,” clearly an anonymous poster… whose tag, I have to assume, is short for “victim.”
I am about 97% sure I know who the author is… but I’m sure not telling.
I cannot vouch for the accuracy of most of the facts or the presumptions of intent assigned to some of the people called out by name. As in all things, perspective matters a lot. But it is a clear position of the feeling of one Variety insider. And that perspective deserves to be heard, in my editorial opinion… even if it is excessively angry and accusatory… and even if it is not.
I have added paragraph breaks for reader sanity.
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I agree with you today about Todd McCarthy — maybe he doesn’t fit the model going forward, but that’s not how you part with a man who has done so much for the Variety brand.
Unfortunately, that’s just kind of the fucked-up way Variety managers handle layoffs. They seem to get off on the process, although I’m sure they’ll be very offended at the suggestion. We’re talking about an organization in which the personnel director, Mark Torres (aka “The Executioner”) has a VP title and is listed high on the masthead.
It’s like clockwork to them now. Every couple of months, Torres will swagger into Tim Gray’s office, along with Kirsten Wilder and/or former Peter Bart assistant Krystal Hunt (carrying a yellow notepad to write down names and dates and such), and they’ll have what looks like a fun, cordial meeting behind closed glass doors. Occasionally, Neil Stiles or Steve Gaydos will pop in — everyone looks like they’re having fun. They’ll repeat this very visible process several times over the course of a month, just in case the staff isn’t sufficiently terrified.
A few weeks later, they’ll blind-side everyone with the news. No proposed buyouts, no warnings, your number is just up — probably because Tim secretly doesn’t like you, or maybe you pissed off Gaydos, or you have a content position Stiles doesn’t value, or who knows.
They process you quickly now. After a morning of terror, in which upper-level employees get axed, lower-end victims are summoned into a room with the other less fortunate of the round, and Gray and Torres calmly give you the news (in case you haven’t already figured it out). Then they read you your rights (severance and such) individually — sometimes playfully bickering as they go — and away you go.
Anne Thompson was given two weeks to pack up her things during the January 2009 round — she took all 14 days to get lost. I’m told now that you’ve got to leave by noon.
A few hours later, Gray will attempt to calm the staff with a memo, telling everyone that they really didn’t need the just-dispersed parts and that the paper is still profitable. He said it in January 2009. Repeated it in April 2009. Said the same thing last week. Gaydos, Wilder, et. al. all get promotions.
Occasionally, an outgoing employee will be honored with a mock Variety front page full of staff-written parodies. But that just serves to make the rank-and-file folks who are just thrown out on their ass feel even worse.
It’s interesting that Variety has many more editors than reporters now. In fact, the trade almost has more folks with publisher-level titles — Stiles, Brian Gott and Linda Buckley Bruno — as reporters. Sure, there’s a good reason people are getting let go — money’s tight, and Gott’s main job acumen (cashing checks) isn’t as easy to pull off as it used to be. But instead of a big, sweeping, professionally handled layoffs, you get terrifying incremental blood loss. And you rarely understand the reason behind the decisions.
For example, designer Danielle Grimes carried the features department on her back for years. She was canned Monday. But Gaydos has two editors in that same department who focus on post-production issues, who probably work half as much.
Often, it’s very obvious that economic conditions are merely an excuse for firing people they don’t like. Former executive editor Michael Speier knows the entertainment business cold, but he was a bit of a polarizing figure in the newsroom, a Peter Bart guy, and Gray — who often called him and fellow editor Kathy Lyford “crazy” behind their backs — used “layoffs” to replace both of them with the more affable but less knowledgeable Leo Wolinsky.
No, Gray wasn’t looking to re-organize Variety to compete against all those barbarian blogs he so disdains — he merely wanted someone he likes working with. Which brings us to the chilling conclusion that we all kind of know: all of this isn’t really going anywhere. Guys like Gray and Gaydos hung their hats for two decades on their abilities to manage up when it came to Peter Bart. But they got tired of that, and grew to resent the man. Now the keys are theirs, and their using Stiles editorial bloodlust to reshape the place to their liking — at least to some degree.
Stiles, meanwhile, is what everybody thought he might be when he came in — a hatchet man, charged with cleaning the place out, cramming it into a new building with a flashy red sign… so that the bloodless European owners could sell the business. None of this seems congruent with any plan to evolve a 100-year-old entertainment journalism brand into the digital age.

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