What Works in Hollywood? Even the Trades Can't Decide

It is said there are no coincidences or irony in Hollywood, so I'll just say it's interesting that today's Hollywood trades are making news themselves, rather than reporting other show business news.

And, the two stories couldn't be more different.

The Hollywood Reporter announced it will become a weekly, glossy-large format magazine starting in October. The trade, started in 1930, has been one of the two mainstays for Hollywood news and gossip for 80 years.

Daily Variety, on the other hand, unveiled another aspect of variety.com, containing its trade archives for the past 105 years. Variety estimates that will be 27,000 issues with more than 850,000 stories, plus reviews, ads and everything Hollywood for the past 105 years.

So, The Hollywood Reporter is trying to take on Sharon Waxman, Nikki Finke, Perez Hilton, Wonderwall, Yahoo's Buzz and others that have been taking its audience by becoming a glossy weekly and offering current subscribers PDF versions?

And Daily Variety is going to stay current by giving us 105 years of fun and nostalgia, but not exactly topical information?

I'm actually looking forward to scrolling and searching through the Variety archives and reliving many happy memories. But I'm not the audience for the future, and most of the younger people in the audience not only have no sense of history, but just don't care.

(That's a shame, because they do keep repeating history and could save a lot of time and money if they did pay attention to what some very smart people said and did in the past.)

I'll keep reading the trades, in whatever form, because I enjoy reading about the new and the old, the breaking and the trendy; and, besides, old habits die hard.

It will be interesting to look back to see what the trades say in a year about the new formats and features. I hope they both work.