How I Would Remake Variety « Making the Movie

22Aug/100

How I Would Remake Variety

UPDATE 8-26-10: I've been contacted by Chris Krewson, editor of Variety.com, with regard to this post. Miraculously, he did not seem to be offended. I'm looking forward to talking with Chris and others at Variety in the coming days and writing more about the future of entertainment news. Watch this space.

FURTHER UPDATE 8-30: In the week since I wrote this, Variety.com has changed the positioning of the "Subscribe" button and Weekly Variety has gone from 24 to 72 pages. (Twenty-eight pages are special feature sections, but the non-special sections do contain a good deal more business analysis articles.) I'd like to take credit for this change but clearly it was already in the works (and the Emmy ads didn't hurt).

YET FURTHER UPDATE 9-2: I met Chris Krewson for lunch today and discussed Variety's future plans. Full report at bottom.

Thin in More Ways than One

I've been reading Variety off and on since 2000. When I started, Variety was king of the pack, the chief source for entertainment business news, chockablock with great intel for everyone in the studio food chain. At first its insular jargon, V-speak, made it tough to understand, but now you'll find me dropping "tentpoles" and "helmers" in my own writing.

Right now I get weekly Variety -- not because I paid the stickershock price of $299/year, but because my sister was able to trade in some airline miles that were otherwise going to be expiring. Like most of Hollywood, I stopped reading Variety during the writer's strike because their coverage was terrible. In simply allowing WGA members to give their side, Nikke Finke's Deadline Hollywood Daily (DHD) beat Variety and Hollywood Reporter six ways to Sunday -- and the readers haven't come back. The Reporter had a "tragic bloodletting" in 2008, slashing staff, and it remains to be seen whether the recent regime change will pull it out of what some call a "death spiral." And, while I was away, Weekly Variety got as thin as (or thinner than) Daily Variety used to be.

It's pathetic. And as I've been paging through it the last few weeks, what's even more pathetic is the thinness of the content. The articles just aren't that useful to someone in the movie business. It's like they took the wrong lesson away from the rise of DHD. Nikke Finke wears her biases on her sleeve and has been caught being spun by PR and studio factions, as anyone who is rushing a story will often be. It's not like she can't be beat. All it takes is something radical: old-fashioned reporting.

Anyway, rather than kvetch, I'll outline what I think would be an ideal entertainment business publication in this age of the internet.

The Base of Operations

So let's pretend Reed Elsevier has just made me captain of the Variety ship... Surprise: I think there's a lot about Variety that doesn't need to change. At 105 years old, Variety has survived a lot. There's a built-in robustness that has stood it in good stead. And it still means something as a brand. PR agents still compete to get their clients into the pages -- a sure sign of a pulse in this town. Its design and slanguage may be old, but lets not throw Benjamin Button out with the bathwater.

I don't think magazines benefit from radical redesigns. Newsweek signaled it was jumping the shark and giving up on excellence when it re-branded. Wired magazine is now laid out so unpredictably that it's difficult to tell what is an ad and what is content.

Better that designs evolve to suit function. First thing's first: A clear button on variety.com that you can click to subscribe. I had to glance through the page five times before I saw the subscribe button. It's on the right side, in a box that makes it look like an ad and jumbled with a bunch of other links. And once you click on it, there needs to be a compelling pitch as to why it is worth subscribing to.

What is Variety for? "Variety is the best signal-to-noise entertainment industry news publication. Timely and accurate information you can count on to make big-dollar decisions." Sell it - but then back it up.

To that end, if Variety wants to be more than movies, i.e. to have coverage of television and theater because the studios also have fingers in those pies, then they need to seriously up their game on interactive entertainment. Video games are a bigger industry than movies, and Variety needs to start treating them that way. This is a big area where there's room for growth as well as analyzing content at the level of brands, rather than, say, breaking Harry Potter down into book, movie, trading card, action figure and Broadway musical form.

One of the best things about Variety has always been their reviews. First of all, they review every movie that runs in the major cities and at major festivals. Each review begins with a broad quality evaluation, and whether the reviewer feels that quality will impact box office. Then there's a plot summary, useful to all the development execs who are nervous the script they are developing is similar. Finally, there's an evaluation of the technical quality of the film, a great indicator for producers debating whether to hire that d.p. or art director.

I understand that cost is a factor, and that is (supposedly) why some of the more veteran reviewers were let go recently. But it's a broken system that prices out people with experience. And because of the risk of payola, there should be salaries and workloads that decrease the attractions of extracurricular activities. I don't want reviewers interviewing stars and writers and directors or running talkbacks after screenings. Any time a reviewer personally knows someone involved in a film, they should be required to recuse themselves from writing about it. Bottom line, if you can't live up to reviewing this massive number of films with the highest standards of fairness, then scale it back to a number of films you can.

Next, when the reviews for a film are published online, the web page should be like a combination of Wikipedia/IMDb. Even before Variety reviews a film, there should be a static page on variety.com with everything that the Variety staff knows about it, all organized in a consistent way so that people can find the particular information they are looking for (plot summary, cast list, box office breakdown).

Next, Variety needs to expose the fiction of "who won the box office?" and start making big headlines for ROI - return on investment. Most studios can market films well enough to bring out audiences in the first three weeks. But after that, if you believe the research by economist Art DeVany, is when box office actually signals quality. That's when you start getting a sense of whether a movie is going to be profitable.

Bland national news sources like USA Today already have the stupid chart of which film took in the most money at theaters, but this is meaningless from a business sense. Films are not all equal. Some cost orders of magnitude more than others; some are in ten theaters, some in three thousand; some had a huge marketing push, some are doing great solely on word of mouth.

Business reporters would be doing everyone a favor if they used a simple, transparent formula to factor everything in and then report who "won" the box office. If the 'Variety Weighted Box Office Chart' was reliably better at picking out which movies audiences are actually preferring, t.v. contracts might start getting based on them instead of raw box office dollars. Then studios wouldn't have to spend so much on ads in order to juice their box office, and everyone would win. The public would get a better clue about which movies are being preferred by audiences and the studios would be incentivized to make better movies -- or at least, ones that better serve audiences.

As far as the slanguage goes, there's nothing wrong to me with being playful with language and creating a sense of insularity. Variety's goal shouldn't be to have everyone in the world as a subscriber. Its goal should be to have everyone who makes tactical decisions in the entertainment business as a subscriber, and everyone who aspires to be one of those people.

The agencies already have their own slave-labor system with mail rooms and coverage farms. Junior agents get assigned to "cover" particular studios. There's no reason Variety can't have an army of low-paid but ambitious cub reporters who are covering the town. If you're tapped in, I guarantee you'll scoop a lot of blogs, get it from reliable sources, and without trying particularly hard. This town is lubricated with little leaks.

The Website is the Thing

Not that Variety needs to compete with the blogs. They can't ignore them -- sometimes major stories break there. But Variety should be content to nail down the story 100% before running it in the official print edition.

That presses the advantage a 105-year-old brand has, but I would take it a step further. Why not turn the tables on the blogs by having a section on the web, and maybe a small column, that reviews the buzz, gossip and rumors (while clearly identifying them as such). Having a team of reporters sifting the internet wheat from the chaff would be valuable. What a busy studio head needs is not the raw SlashFilm stream, but a concise report of what stories seem to have traction across the blogs and in the wider media.

Variety.com needs to be less like a newspaper page and more like a stock ticker. All the state-of-the-industry stats should be there at a glance. Top-sellers in books, video games, music, home video. Box office charts. Stock prices for the top conglomerates. Which stars are up on the IMDb star meter, which ones are down, with quick links where Variety's top analysts explain why. Everything along the current model of the Crix Pix box, where you can see at a glance how a movie is being reviewed - much more effective than what Rotten Tomatoes does.

And not only should every film have its own static page, every industry player should as well. Updated as soon as the information can be confirmed, before any longer story is even written. (Ex. Vince Vaughn confirmed cast in Ron Howard comedy The Dilemma.) Links to Studio Systems is a good start, but this should be more integrated into the whole ecosystem.

How many entertainment stories are no more than headlines? So why require reporters to write 500 words about them. It's a waste of everyone's time.

There should be a couple of experts who are watching these streams of facts and offering some in-depth analysis of the implications. I'm not talking about Peter Bart writing more-or-less the same state-of-the-industry column, I'm talking about something that is supported by meaningful quotes from executives and raw data.

For this, you probably only need Weekly Variety, maybe only Monthly as a print edition. Let's face it, besides a few dinos, everyone in this industry is online. Now is not the time to serve the troglodytes who aren't. By concentrating the news that is relevant only in short time-frames on the web, you can make the print edition much better in terms of signal-to-noise. Only the really essential coverage shows up here, and that's what you hide behind the online paywall.

Or not. It seems like even the Wall Street Journal can be accessed for free.

As long as winning an Oscar increases the prestige of the players and the pocketbooks of financiers, there will be a value in the For Your Consideration ads which pay the bills at Variety. But to keep getting those ad dollars, Variety needs to have a reason to be actually read. I'm sure there are great reporters who are still there, plugging away, wanting the time to write something deeper and more original than they are currently constrained from doing. This week's article on Netflix and streaming windows had some substance. (Not to brag, but I wrote about the shifting of distribution windows two months ago. I don't think my analysis is as good or as deep, but I'm a guy who writes something up in a few spare hours, so I don't buy that there isn't budget for more of this type of reporting.)

Variety's biggest asset can be credibility. Credibility is long in building and quickly erased. Parroting the studio line during the inevitable guild negotiations is not the way to stay credible. The studios insiders know what what the economics are for both sides, and what is posturing. And on your average Hollywood news day, even the PR people know what the truth is behind their own hype. Which source do you think is going to get the most respect, the one that publishes the press release verbatim or the one cuts through the cant to the core of the matter? Let the praiseries peddle their wares to the blogs, and in the meantime, give the industry what it craves: actionable intelligence!

[Thanks to JC, GL, AC and others with whom I've discussed this over the past few months. And thanks to Variety for repeatedly asking for my opinion about what they should do to change. Sorry for not returning it in survey form.]

UPDATE 9-2-2010: Had a nice lunch today with Variety.com editor Chris Krewson. He's a very engaging, very sharp guy with a background in old-fashioned journalism, very energized by the chance to document the entertainment industry's bellwether transition to digital technologies. He told me this post has made the rounds at Variety and assured me that they were already working on some of the issues I identified above. Right now they have a website that was designed to be free -- and then had a paywall slapped on top -- and it is generated by a very cumbersome circa-2003 CMS (Content Management System). They are working on implementing a new, more-flexible CMS in the coming months. Variety's entire 100+ year archives will also soon go online.

I brought up the idea of doing A/B on headlines, like Huffington Post. (They write two headlines and see which one gets clicked on more in the first few minutes, which determines the final headline.) He said that this is not warranted with the scale of their traffic. Variety actually has the very comfortable position of not having to worry about raw internet traffic numbers, just about having the right traffic. Putting a paywall on the site hurt traffic, but boosted subscriptions by 10%.

On the subject of boosting subscriptions, I suggested that they market the tax-deductibility of a subscription to younger people in the industry (like me), who balk at the $299 number. What also occurs to me now is that that number could be made to look smaller by breaking it down into a monthly or weekly figure. I also suggested mini-subscriptions to text or email alerts -- say $1/month for alerts when there is an article about Lion's Gate -- perfect for people trying to cover specific studios or agencies. But these are marketing ideas to generate revenue. Variety doesn't need my help: unlike most print outlets, Crewson noted, Variety is still in the black.

It does not seem like Variety will be ditching the paywall any time soon, or marking some content specifically to be freely available on the web. We talked about how this limits any kind of wider conversation or interaction with the link economy of the web, something I think should be done, even if only as marketing to help convince people to pay for a subscription. Krewson noted that free Variety removed commenting, because most articles did not get comments, excepting those that were linked to by websites with chatty readerships, like Drudge Report. Is it okay for a paper not to have reader interaction? I suppose. But part of the value of an industry newsletter like Jason Calacanis' Jason Nation is the responses from power player readers. Of course, the irony that I was being socially engaged as a reader by having lunch with a Variety editor in person is not lost.

Social media is the buzzword du jour, but I'm skeptical of corporate Facebook Fan pages and Twitter accounts. Variety has both, of course. But are social media resources better invested in other areas? Would a cool HTML5 interactive interface for box office numbers drive more engagement than headline tweets?

Krewson assured me that, unlike Hollywood Reporter with its spreads on three years of Kathy Griffin red carpet dresses, Variety remains committed to real business news. And they remain committed to print publication for as long as it is profitable, which may be longer than I perhaps originally imagined. Another idea: Even when putting the news on paper goes away, sell framed versions of full-page Congratulations ads for people to treasure as keepsakes. Then you'll always be 'in print.'