The Unbearable Heaviness of Unpaid Content

For over 30 years, I have been a devout reader of Variety.

Now, I hate the actual printed magazine.  It doesn't take long to read, maybe fifteen or twenty minutes in a good week.  And this quick read comes in the form of an oversize magazine printed on heavy coated white paper.   Who wants to go around on the subway holding a heavy, oversized magazine that doesn't take very long to read and which requires lots and lots of page turns?  The magazine is as annoying as it is informative.

However, the printed magazine is now only a small portion of the total content Variety offers.  Every week there are dozens of articles and reviews and columnists to be found on the magazine's website that aren't to be found in the weekly magazine.

There is no paywall on the website.  The owner of Variety has made a business decision not to charge for its content.

I prefer content like this in print. There are week-long stretches when I have plenty of time to sit at my computer or use their iPad app and devour all the content the website has to offer, but there are other times when it would be so much nicer to have a printed publication with more of the content which I can read outside when it is too cold for the iPad, or when I am on cellular data.  I spend enough of my life at a computer and it keeps dragging me to spend more of it there.

It's a dilemma.

Maybe less of one, maybe easier to pay, if I just didn't like the magazine. But no. I actively dislike the magazine.  It is an annoyance.  I dread seeing it arrive in my mailbox each week.  There is no way to subscribe to the magazine without casting a vote in its favor, and that isn't a vote I wish to cast. I guess I could get an "online subscription" but why would anyone do that when all the content is there for free? As a result of a conscious business decision by the owner.

It feels kind of like putting money into a tip jar, only in this case it would be the tip jar of the wealthy owner of Penske Media who made a decision not to charge for content, and to develop a magazine I don't want to read.

So why does it still feel wrong not to pay?

Unplanned Obsolescence

There's nothing like the internet to make me feel obsolete sometimes.

As an example, I used to plan to see movies on opening weekend.  There would be an ad in the Sunday paper or in the Village Voice on Wednesday telling me that a movie was opening on Friday.  It might even have told me which theater it was opening at.  I'd have days to anticipate going to the Astor Plaza or the Ziegfeld or some other particularly nice theatre.  Now, maybe, I'll check the NY Times home page on Thursday night and there will be reviews of movies opening the next day, and I'll finally know what's opening.  Many of the movies won't even have ads in the paper on the day they open, or they'll have ads without theatre listings.  If it weren't for the movie clocks in newspapers, the only damned way I'd know where to see a movie would be to scroll through 12 pages of listings, two theatres or three theatres to a page, on the internet.  It would almost make me not want to go to the movies any more.  I feel old.

Now, Variety is migrating.

Like a lot of print media, Variety has been in trouble.  It's lost ads and readers, it's lost relevance to websites like Deadline.com, which is owned by the new owners of Variety.  25 years ago I could remember special issues like for the 25th anniversary of James Bond movies that would go on for 50 pages full of ads from anyone who had ever so much as supplied an ashtray to the plot department of a James Bond movie.  Now special sections have two pages or two columns or two column inches of ads from somebody's mother.

A few years ago Variety decided to hide its content behind a pay wall, which only hastened the migration of readers to other Hollywood sites.

So now, the pay wall is down.  Daily Variety will be gone in two weeks.  There will be one weekly issue like what the Hollywood Reporter has been doing.

And this totally sucks.

Because, first, the Variety web site sucks.

Please, click here, look at it.  Am I missing something?  Am I so old that I don't know a sucky website when it stares me in the face?  To me, this is just a random bunch of garbage strewn randomly down a web page with no grouping of any information in any discernible form or fashion.  Where is my eye supposed to go?

Clicking a link to an individual section header isn't much better.  Any better.  Let's look at the film section.  If you want to find anything in the section, you've got to go scrolling down and down and down and down because there's no "there" there.  Wherever you go, you have to just scroll down and down and down and down and down and down and down and down for 1 little headline after another with a very big picture.  My life isn't long enough to go scrolling and scrolling and scrolling.

There are no RSS feeds.  You can sign up for newsletters, and maybe the new owners will be better than the old ones who couldn't keep track of what newsletters you did or didn't want and who felt they could send you new newsletters you hadn't asked for until you begged them to stop.

As frustrating as the fact that I'm now not sure where to go to keep up with Hollywood is the absence of having somebody tell me what news was important for me to read.

The internet makes it too easy to discover only what you want to discover, to visit only the websites you want to visit and follow on Twitter of friend on Facebook only the people you want.  It closes out different views, different perspectives, puts blinders on to things that might be important but which aren't on your radar.

But getting a mass communication product, even for a small community like Hollywood with Daily Variety, means that you are forced to turn the pages and find on those pages not just what you already know you want to know, but other things beyond.  It provides a forced path to learning about the world beyond your own immediate and narrow horizons.

Even if I find some Hollywood news site that I'll visit in order to find what Variety will no longer provide, the temptation will be to focus only on those things I want to focus on, to lose depth and breadth of seeing a headline for something else and being tempted to explore.

I don't think this is an improvement.  I feel old, outdated, like yesterday's model, because I'm not seeing this as a step forward.

Print Media

So I haven't done a post on the newspaper business in a while...

Two things in Tuesday's NY Times that got me to wanting to climb on the soapbox.

First, there's an actual bona fide full-color full-page ad for The Hurt Locker in the arts section. Years ago, right after the Golden Globes you could see the difference between the early edition and late edition NY Times, as all the film studios took out placeholder ads for all of their movies, and then would quickly swap in something more appropriate for the late edition to tout their winners. Same thing after Oscar nominations were announced, or after the Oscars themselves. Film ads in the Times have been steadily declining for years and years now, to the point where it's an actual surprising thing to see studios actually taking ads in size or quantity. And in fact, that rather "wow, what's that doing here" ad for The Hurt Locker today was the only film ad in the NY Times for any of the Oscar-winning movies. The total balance of the film ads was less than one third of a page.

And then there's the very sad news that Variety has given the heave-ho to its chief film critic Todd McCarthy and to its chief theater critic, David Rooney. It's all about the money, of course. The advertising in Variety is as sparse as it is in other print media, and the amount of award-related advertising was a tenth that I can remember seeing not all that many years ago. But this move by Variety is in my opinion a major bush league mistake. McCarthy was an excellent and learned film critic. He gave major reviews to the major releases of the last 31 years. He was rarely wildly off target in his reviews. He was himself a filmmaker whose documentary Visions of Light is an excellent film about cinematography. This where I'll cede the microphone a bit to Roger Ebert, who says far more and better in this blog post about Todd McCarthy than I really could.

Having been at Variety for 31 years, and with the title of Chief Film Critic, no doubt McCarthy did not come cheap on the salary front. And as noted above, Variety isn't rolling in the dough right now. But Roger Ebert ends his post by saying "if Variety no longer requires its chief film critic, it no longer requires me as a reader." And on that sentiment, I entirely agree. I've been reading Variety fairly regularly for a good 30 years right now. In my teenage years, after I first discovered the charms of Variety for myself, if I went to New York City for some reason, I put down my dollar. If my parents were going to NYC, they knew there was a standing order for them to please come back with that week's issue. When I started my own business and could then write off the cost of a subscription, going from buying the NY Times and Variety to subscribing were among the first checks on the JABberwocky accounts. And I read Variety in no small part for its serious reviews, for the belief when I read a Todd McCarthy review that I'm becoming part of a serious industry discussion. In dumping a Todd McCarthy, Variety is, to me, saying that it no longer cares to be a serious part of the industry discussion. And if Variety doesn't want to be a serious part of the industry discussion -- no, we don't need Variety.

And it ain't cheap to subscribe to Variety, for a thinning paper that takes less and less time to read and has migrated more and more of its content to the internet where it's vastly less pleasant to read.

One of McCarthy's last reviews is for this week's opener Remember Me. This is likely one of the longest and most serious reviews you'll find for a teen romantic comedy with Robert Pattinson. I don't know if McCarthy is "right" in his review or not, but I know that he gave this kind of serious critical attention to every film he reviewed.

I can't raise quite the same passion for David Rooney. Rooney had very big shoes to fill when his predecessor Charles Isherwood was lured away by the NY Times as part of a major upgrade in its arts coverage several years back. Isherwood is a great critic, and I was upset because he's the #2 theatre critic at the Times and thus reviewing fewer of the major Broadway shows than he did at Variety. Rooney is no Charles Isherwood. But it's the same basic thing. Covering theatre has been an important part of the Variety DNA since the paper was founded, and how exactly do you cover theatre when you don't have a dedicated solid critical voice you can count on.

How long does Variety have to live? This week's news is like watching someone with a termina disease who's been managing to cover it up, compensate, bring the belt in a little tighter or something, and all of a sudden it's progressed too far to keep it hidden, and you look at the wan face and thinning waist and wispier voice and suddenly realize the end is really coming.