The Hollywood Reporter was one of two major trade publications of the film industry in the United States during the last century, the other being Variety. Today both newspapers cover what is now more broadly called the entertainment industry.
History
The Hollywood Reporter was the entertainment industry's first daily trade paper in Hollywood. It began as a daily film publication, fought then added television coverage in the 1950's and began in the late 1980's to cover all intellectual property industries.
Founder
In September 1930, former film salesman William R. "Billy" Wilkerson published the debut issue of The Hollywood Reporter. The banner headline read, "INDIE REVOLUTION." Studio chieftains were stunned to find themselves covered by an aggressive independent newspaper, with one famous company going so far as to make bonfires of the latest editions.
The dapper, smooth, but-tough-talking Wilkerson became a player in Hollywood, helping develop the Sunset Strip and launching famed celebrity watering holes and eateries, Cafe Trocadero and Ciro's. He was part of the early stages of development of the Flamingo Hotel in Las Vegas, partnering at one point with gangster Bugsy Siegel, but was allegedly bought out before the hotel opened when he was 'made an offer he couldn't refuse.'
Ownership changes
Wilkerson ran The Hollywood Reporter until his death in 1962, when his wife, Tichi Wilkerson, took over as publisher and editor-in-chief. She sold the paper in the late 1980's. Then the editorial quality improved under editor Teri Ritzer (now a Disney international film executive) and publisher Robert Dowling. Ritzer hired editors with daily newspaper experience, in an attempt to dampen much of the rah-rah coverage and cronyism that had infected the paper since Wilkerson's death. Still, the subtle, sweet smell of croniyism simmered for years after Ritzer left. Dowling ran the paper until his retirement in late 2005, and the current publisher, Tony Uphoff, assumed the position in 2006.
The Hollywood Reporter is currently owned by the Netherlands-based VNU, whose properties include Billboard, Ad Week and A.C. Nielsen. It is published in English.
Presence on the web
The Hollywood Reporter was the first daily entertainment trade to go online, in late 1995. Yet to the dismay of many young staffers, it still used vintage IBM-styled selectric typewriters in several departments well into the 1990's and was sluggish in modernizing by adding common business equipment such as computers, scanners and color printers to all departments. Archival materials were routinely microfilmed as late as 1998 rather than digitized, even though the system to view it was in storage or broken. Interoffice email appeared only by the late 1990's as well. It was Dowling who was key in essentially dragging the paper into the 20th century just as it entered the 21st.
Current status and legacy
The Hollywood Reporter has been called an 'institution,' (many who have worked there insist that it is) publishing out of the same offices on Sunset Boulevard for more than a half century, although by the 1970's the aging offices had become a time capsule more akin to the 1950's and the paper had clearly outgrown them. (Today, the offices are in L.A.'s Mid-Wilshire district.) Shirley MacLaine once paid a visit to the Sunset offices, marching up to a columnist and slapping him over an item he wrote. In 1962 Bette Davis took out an exclusive classified ad looking for work which only appeared in the Reporter. Game show host Bob Barker once walked in and personally placed his own ad in the paper. Michael Ovitz has read it, too. Many famous, not-so-famous and infamous people peruse the Reporter.
The Hollywood Reporter's conferences and award shows include the Key Art Awards, which aim to recognize the best in movie marketing and advertising. Its Women in Film issue is a popular but somewhat controversial if not subjective ranking of female movie executives. It's 'Young Star Awards' showed promise but fizzled.
Curiously, the paper's influential celebrity marketability rating system, Star Power, has fallen out of use in recent years. It had been recently reported in the business pages and mentioned of late by associate publisher, Lynne Segall, that the Reporter may be put up for sale by VNU. Futurists may well predict that the final curtain could come down on this venerable publication which has weathered 75 years of change. But like similar hard copy publications, it could emerge and thrive reborn, publishing as a total online entity, in tune with the changing times on the internet, much like Salon. As they say, 'that's showbiz.'
Editors and reporters today
The Hollywood Reporter's roster of editors and reporters numbers more than 60, with another 50 editors, reporters and correspondents spread around the globe, having slightly downsized when VNU absorbed BPI at the turn of 21st century. Like Daily Variety, the paper publishes only on week days, although the Reporter's web site essentially produces a Saturday edition.
Key players at the Reporter as of 2006 are VNU veteran and new publisher Tony Uphoff, replacing Robert Dowling, editor Howard 'Scoop' Burns, editorial director Matthew King, Internet editor/exec Glenn Abel and deputy editor Cynthia Littleton. Anne Thompson, a veteran film reporter, brought her 'Risky Business' column to the paper and recently spun it off as a blog.
The Hollywood Reporter can pay very well or very poorly, depending on a talent or need for a given battle in the paper wars, although top managenent is rumored to be generously if not lavishly compensated. This may or may not be a norm at trade journals in general, yet it is curious for well-heeled Tinseltown, where image over substance is the rule and inside information is worth millions. 'High school with money' is a commonly voiced truism. Staff turnover during the 1990's could be considered abnormally high by most corporate standards in publishing or other industries-- beyond what may be measured as normal attrition. It has been said that even today, both The Reporter and it's only competitor, Variety, may still be 'in transition' from their boutique days as small, independent, privately owned papers steeped in the back street shenanigans that made Hollywood work in an era long gone, although both were absorbed into large publishing firms many years ago run from the other coast.
Competition with Variety
The Reporter's website is competitive to Variety's, but Variety's site has grown more aggressive in recent years. Variety makes good use of its well-branded heritage as part of the Hollywood scene and culture, not just an observer reporting on it. The Reporter, on the other hand, is sometimes considered by industry insiders as outside that circle looking in and continues to struggle with branding an image for itself, in spite of being established in Hollywood three years before Variety. For instance, Variety's 'brand' is secure in Hollywood history thanks to countless radio, film and TV usages. It has vintage and high profiled product positioning that continues to perpetuate awareness of their place in Hollywood culture in such old films as Singin' In The Rain, Yankee Doodle Dandy and timeless TV shows like I Love Lucy, Make Room For Daddy and others. The Reporter has tried to do the same in recent years.
Objective readers sense the Reporter is a better business tool and news product, but it is Variety that remains the first name that comes to mind when Hollywood trade papers are discussed. Still, in 2002, the Reporter's website won the prestigious Jesse H. Neal award for business journalism. Other electronic products include a daily East Coast PDF edition, U.S. and European daily email editions, and the Times Square-like news scroll at the intersection of Hollywood and Highland in Los Angeles. (Savvy newshounds call this 'the zipper').Hollywoodreporter.com wants to be a 'WSJ' for the media business. Ultimately, Hollywoodreporter.com wants to post showbiz news 24/7 from L.A. and bureaus in New York and Europe.
Daily Variety and the Reporter both are located on Wilshire Blvd along the well-trafficked 'Miracle Mile.' Talent often migrates between the papers. There is a history of 'bad blood' between the rivals bordering on the obsessive, sometimes petty and occasionally myopic. Variety was long established as an entertainment trade paper in Vaudeville circles, Tin Pan Alley and in the theatre district of New York City, but it was the Reporter that began covering the developing film business in Hollywood in 1930. Variety didn't start its Hollywood edition until 1933. Today's Variety editor, Peter Bart, once sputtered to a reporter, "They're not journalists at all," but even by Fox News standards, Bart himself is hardly regarded as an Edward R. Murrow. Yet 'Blinkie' Bart, as he is known to some in the business, has a long history of recruiting Reporter writers once they've established bylines. A 'byline' was a popular perk in the old days of print journalism for writers and reporters, when people got their business news a day later on paper 'dan' rather instantly on TV or via the web. Of course Bart's loose, colorful, and sometimes questionable standards of ethics have been fodder for industry gossips, wags and tattlers for years.
Public relations issues
Officially at least, the Reporter has taken the 'high road' in the paper wars. But it has had its own share of contoversies over ethics as recently as 2001, when the Reporter's top editor and a key industry reporter resigned in protest when their journalistic ethics and integrity were stiff-armed then stonewalled by established and questionable corporate policies swirling around the 'George Christy' matter. There was also controversy when mainstream news organizations worldwide attempted to locate White House intern Monica Lewinsky, who had fled Washington as the Clinton scandal broke in 1998. Ms. Lewinsky's mother had implied in some jacket notes on a book she wrote that she had been-- or was then recently-- a journalist at the Reporter. However, she had done part-time editing or reporting work a decade earlier (the specifics remain cloudy due to poor record keeping from the era) and in fact she was not a recent full-time staff employee. Resourceful, professional and intrepid journalists, who uncovered this errant fact, besieged the Reporter by phone, fax and in person searching for Monica Lewinsky-- then rumored to be staying with her mother-- by following the lead from her mother's booknotes as the scandal unfolded. But neither person was found at or through the Reporter.
In the late 1940's and mid-1950's, many of Wilkerson's 'red baiting' headlines in the Reporter during the HUAC hearings may have helped fan the flames of Hollywood's 'Red Scare' when the industry 'blacklisting' emerged. It was a dark but colorful era. Indeed, Wilkerson was reporting on communists in Hollywood as early as 1935. It was also a small news item placed in the Reporter about a studio press screening of a new RKO film called Citizen Kane that snowballed into the legendary industry showdown between the then rising talent, Orson Welles, and William Randolph Hearst, the powerful yellow journalist and publisher. Today, in the paper wars, staffers who let their hair down on occasion have been heard to mutter 'if it's news, it's news to us,' usually in cynical jest, occasionally not, after the throes of a battle with their competitor down the street. The trades' print circulation figures are about the same -- low in number (generally fluxuating between 25,000 - 35,000) but reach a lucrative demographic group. However, both trades have an advertising base of chiefly film and television studios peppered with a few upscale goods and services. Diversification by the Reporter, for example, into other consumer and business products, routine for most newspapers, many business and general consumer publications, remains a challenge for sales professionals plagued by the pressure to produce short term results without time or incentive to cultivate effective long-term relationships based on disciplined marketing strategies. Some critics have noted the trades can be little more than reams of ads dipped in a sugarcoating of studio press releases.
Check out The Hollywood Reporter's website to see how it is competing in today's multimedia environment: