Illustration by Steven P Hughes
As sure as this Sunday’s Academy Awards will go over its allotted time slot, Hollywood’s trade publications will publish dozens upon dozens of recaps, analyses, photo galleries and social-media roundups of the biggest night in showbiz.
For Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, Deadline, IndieWire and Gold Derby, this weekend marks the capstone of an annual and essential cycle. Not just for the reporting that drives readership, but for the advertising departments that support those publications, all of which rely on the lucrative “For Your Consideration” campaigns that studios pay for every awards season to ensure their films are top of mind for voters.
But while the average reader might neither understand nor care about the editorial nuances that differentiate Variety (meat-and-potatoes coverage) from The Hollywood Reporter (glossier, longer-form features) and Deadline (breathless scoops on hirings and firings) from IndieWire (essentially the nerdiest subset of Film Twitter come to life), most certainly don’t realize one crucial thing: the fact that all the publications are owned by the same company, Penske Media.
The great unspoken truth of Hollywood media – and thus Hollywood’s entire cultural narrative – is that the money all flows from a single source. Run by Jay Penske, scion of a motorsports empire (his billionaire father, Roger Penske, owns the Indianapolis Motor Speedway), Penske Media’s monopoly isn’t so much a debate inside the film world as it is an accepted matter of fact.
“Why is this okay? Because there has ceased to be any media-watchers over Hollywood. That beat has been abandoned with the exception of New York and D.C., and those who do have an interest think Hollywood is a big joke anyway,” says longtime industry journalist Richard Rushfield, whose popular subscription newsletter turned digital media enterprise The Ankler is one of only a handful of Hollywood-focused media not controlled by Penske.
“When people do pay attention, it’s in an anthropological way. Like, isn’t that cute! There’s one guy in Hollywood who owns all the media outlets, how about that! Instead of, you know, rigorously pointing out the many conflicts of interests.”
Conflicts that were made glaringly apparent this past summer when Penske acquired the Golden Globe Awards from the Hollywood Foreign Press Association. If the Golden Globes were perilously close to becoming a moribund joke – as seemed the case in 2022, after a series of scandals inside the HFPA ensured the awards weren’t even broadcast on television – then you wouldn’t know it from the relentless coverage in Variety and other Penske publications this past winter.
The abridged history of how Penske – an ironically press-shy figure who only seems to give interviews to Italian racing journalists – has been able to amass such an empire starts with Deadline. Founded by journalist Nikki Finke, who died in 2022, the website burst onto the scene in the mid-aughts with a take-no-prisoners attitude toward the industry, fuelled by Finke’s notoriously explosive temperament.
“Jay started out by making some very shrewd business decisions, one of which was buying Deadline in 2009 – that was a gigantic rock thrown into the pool of Hollywood media,” says Stephen Galloway, a former executive editor of The Hollywood Reporter and now dean of the Chapman University film school in Orange, Calif. “That put Jay on the map, and it was very clever because it showed that he understood a website with just a handful of people can be very lucrative. You don’t have all the legacy costs of printers and trucks.”
Yet Penske would quickly get around to dealing with those printers and trucks, first by acquiring Variety in 2012, then going a giant leap further by buying that publication’s longtime rival, The Hollywood Reporter, in 2020. In between he gobbled up – sometimes with co-investors, sometimes not – websites IndieWire and Gold Derby. Not to mention such venerable outlets as Vibe, Billboard, Women’s Wear Daily, Artforum and Rolling Stone.
And Penske has not limited himself to publications, either. Along with the Golden Globes, Penske Media also houses Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve, the American Music Awards and a major stake in Austin, Tex.’s annual South By Southwest festival. You can find detailed reporting on all the transactions in such Penske publications as Deadline and Variety, with the necessary disclaimers tucked inside.
Surprisingly, there has yet to be any major consolidation when it comes to Penske’s Hollywood outlets. Each publication operates its own newsroom and advertising department. Variety and THR reporters treat each other as fierce rivals, battling for exclusives.
“When he took over, everybody thought, oh he owns all of them now, he’ll do some synergy and get ad deals done across the trades – he’ll make it one product. But he hasn’t – they are all quite separate,” says Galloway. “The issue now is that all his eggs are in one basket, with one major revenue stream: the studios and their FYC campaigns around awards season. And now that business is in retrenchment.”
Indeed, as studios wobble out of the disaster that was 2023 – complete with duelling strikes, high interest rates and the waning days of the streaming wars – what was once estimated to be a $200-million a year For Your Consideration advertising market threatens to dry up, leaving each Penske publication to fight with the other for whatever remains. Last week, for instance, Paramount announced that it was cutting spending across the board, including marketing.
“Even though readership for these publications has exploded online, the revenue hasn’t. And there’s one other key thing – there’s been a diaspora of talent to independent rivals,” says Galloway, name-checking Rushfield’s The Ankler and upstart newsletter Puck, which publishes a twice-weekly inside-baseball dispatch from Matt Belloni, another former THR editor. “These are tiny operations, but people subscribe, and they’re not dependent on advertising. This has become the new model of trade journalism: a handful of people who truly know their stuff, and readers who will pay for it.”
Or as Rushfield puts it: “The legacy publications have become so beholden to their advertisers – the studios that they’re covering – that they’ve largely ceased to be interesting to the readership, leaving an opportunity for people like us to come in and do it more interestingly and efficiently.”
And when the advertising starts to falter, the fallout could be exceptionally messy.
“Penske’s publications have survived because they have these legacy FYC accounts that keep the money coming in,” adds Rushfield. “When those accounts fall below operating expenses, you would presume it would dawn on Penske to look around and say, ‘Wait, why do I have two of these again?’ ”