'Daily Variety' to Be Daily No Longer

Time's have changed and, last week, a Hollywood staple made the change with them. Like publications everywhere, Hollywood's Daily Variety has dropped its daily print publication.

Those in the film industry—and those who would like to be in the film industry—can still get their daily dos of trade reports, but they'll have to get them online. Alternately, they can wait for a weekly print issue of the publication.

As is the case with print publications across the board, the Daily Variety print edition is losing its audience to the Internet.

"We were delivering a print product telling you stories you've already read on our website," Variety Publisher Michelle Sobrino told the Los Angeles Times. "Financially it didn't make sense."

In the same article, the Times reported the paper only made $6 million last year, a significant drop from the more than $30 million it made in 2006.

The Daily Variety is, itself, a product of technological change, points out cultural historian Neil Gabler of the University of Southern California's Norman Lear Center to NPR.

In an interview with the public radio station, Gabler explains that the original Variety, a weekly, primarily covered Broadway and vaudeville, but as the motion picture industry advanced, the paper decided it needed a daily Los Angeles edition to cover it. The Hollywood version was launched in 1933.

"Every day, virtually every executive, every author — in fact every stagehand — would get their copy of Daily Variety and thumb through it to see what films were being put into production, what the grosses were, what executive was being fired," Gabler told NPR.

Those following the Daily Variety might have seen the writing on the wall back in October when Penske Media Corp. bought Variety.

[See the Patch story about the deal here.]

The Santa Monica-based digital media company already owned Deadline.com, a dominant show business news source. At the time, Chief Executive Jay Penske said Variety and Deadline will continue as separate entities.

Back at NPR, Gabler lamented Variety's move to a mainly online platform:

"I think there is sadness. ... I think there was this kind of ritual that almost everyone in Hollywood had gone through, where they'd grab their coffee and they'd grab their Daily Variety, and they'd sit there — probably looking for their own names. ... But I think now that ritual is gone."