So now... Peter Bart gets kicked up and out. (Remember when The Hollywood Reporter did the same to Bob Dowling a few years back?)
This was inevitable, but not quite a solution. Bart was in the way of the future. Bart is no longer in the way of the future. But Variety has not answered the same question plaguing other Traditional Media outlets that have a much wider path on which to seek answers.
New Media, which Bart resisted fiercely, is not a panacea for an outlet like Variety, since the one thing the paper has that really differentiates it from the now endless stream of show business media out there IS the paper. 45,000 subscriptions - whether or not more than 30% of those hard copies are being read anymore - is the only unique proposition that Variety has left... especially now that they have cut way back on the one other area where they had a unique proposition, a role as one of the few places to review virtually every film you might want to see reviewed.
Want to top Variety in that area this very year? Hire 4 out-of-work quality critics for $30k a piece to write you a minimum of 3 reviews a week every week. Add another $50k for freelancers another $100k to the budget for travel. And for $250,000, YOU are Variety's superior. And frankly, you wouldn't really have to spend that much. You could cut the travel budget back to $50k, lay more heavily of festival freelancers, and you could probably get some really good critics to work for less than $30k.
But those 45,000 print copies a day, during the award season, expected to sit around the office for a week or more each... those are worth some big money... that one cover is. 100 days a year... $75k a year (and dropping… off 11% in last year’s fourth quarter)... that's $7.5 million. Online, I'm guessing they can do another $1.5 million or so. The number is surely low… but let’s use it to float the discussion…
Could you run Variety for $9 million a year? What do you do to maintain the legitimacy of the paper and website for that kind of money?
Truth is, there are many of us out there who could build a competitive trade magazine with that kind of revenue base. But we are starting with much smaller infrastructures, particularly in printing. Even with a retail price tag of more than $1 a day for a subscription, Variety takes a loss on its annual subscriptions. How much does it cost to publish 60,000 copies of Daily Variety, 250 or so days a year (roughly 15 million copies printed and delivered a year)? I don’t know, really.
And there’s the rub. How far can the Reed Business folks cut through the on-Oscar season and still ramp up the prices during the award season itself?
The painful reality is that content is the cheapest part of the product for Variety. They have to pull back and to be less extravagant than they have been… but they have to keep publishing enough of a paper with enough of an impact to keep from becoming… well… The Hollywood Reporter.
Anyway…
Tim Gray is a good man and a very good company man. I have no bones to pick with him. But I don’t see him as the visionary of the paper’s future either. He will keep the machine running and running with less personality issues than Bart, but he will surely be managing someone else’s idea of the future.
Of course, news of the move is indicative of the problems that face Variety, above and beyond revenue issues. Variety ran the story at 5:30pm, then Nikki Finke ran it while claiming she could have broken it but got jobbed by Tim Gray (who she didn’t call until Sunday at 5 even though she “knew about this” last night… perhaps too busy talking to Roger Ailes to bother to report much bigger industry news… but then again, Nikki is known for her careful restraint, especially regarding Peter Bart), followed by The Wrap doing nothing but reiterating the Variety story, and then Anne Thompson, who linked to The Wrap (where she might get a freelance gig eventually) and Variety (where she has one) … and now, me and surely others now and before me and after me… yadda yadda yadda.
I’ve certainly had my share of scraping for position in my day… but now, it’s all day, every day, on every story. Who is first with which scrap and who are they crediting for the work they didn’t do, etc, etc, etc. And Variety, as most media blogs know, is as guilty of these thefts as anyone, though they don’t tend to have the balls to claim an EXCLUSIVE. (The exclusive is becoming like a virgin counting which acts she/he has experienced so far. First kiss, first copped feel, first show and tell… all are EXCLUSIVE! these days.)
Good luck, Tim. Sorry it didn’t happen when your paper was at full power.
Read the complete post at http://www.mcnblogs.com/thehotblog/archives/2009/04/another_veteran.html