Is It Curtains for The Hollywood Reporter? Variety Publisher Penske Media Group to Operate Rival THR, Billboard and Vibe in Joint Venture With MRC

The era of dueling Hollywood trade pubs is over. 

Variety reports that its parent company Penske Media Corp. has inked a deal with MRC to operate The Hollywood Reporter, Billboard and Vibe under a joint venture. The newly formed company will be called PMRC. The deal puts longtime rivals Variety and THR under the same roof for the first time ever, and also means that leading music pubs Billboard, Vibe and PMC's Rolling Stone will now be family. 

Dick Clark Productions and other assets will be spun off under a second joint venture, charged with developing new content from brands across the company. (So you know what that means: more awards shows.)

Tongues are wagging as to the ultimate fate of THR. Will Jay Penske continue to run the two trade titles as separate, quasi-independent entities (á la the old "joint operating agreement" of daily newspapers, where business operations are merged while the newsrooms continue to compete with one another) or will he fold Variety's longtime rival? 

"Whether Penske decides to shut THR depends on how it is performing financially," Reed Phillips — the chairman of Oaklins DeSilva+Phillips, which specializes in M&As for media, marketing and tech businesses — told me this morning. "If it is doing OK, it might be a smart strategy to keep it alive because you are often better off competing with yourself by having two strong brands in the same market rather than leaving an opening for another."

Another media insider told me, referencing Penske's track record of taking over and making over titles like Variety, Rolling Stone and WWD: "Penke's business model has been to acquire established brands with loyal audiences that have been mismanaged in the past. They cut costs, but they don't have a history of folding things. They don't fold businesses — they transform businesses by bringing them into the 21st century."

As for myself, someone who has worked on and off for years for some of these pubs and their corporate siblings, reading about all this is kind of like watching a wedding between Hatfields and McCoys. Let's wait and see whether it turns into a bloodbath.

The Magazine Nobody Cares About Anymore Puts Somebody You Barely Care About on October Cover

It's been awhile since I hated on Vanity Fair, so here I go again, shooting a dead, unimportant, uninteresting fish in a barrel. Remember when this magazine mattered, when we anxiously awaited each issue to see which A-list star had made the cover, at one time the most valuable piece of media real estate in Hollywood? While Fashionista dubs the October cover of VF featuring Elle Fanning a "must-read," others aren't convinced. Noting the well-mannered shot of Fanning posing by the seaside in a Dior gown with a couple of hoity-toity hounds, Roger Friedman of Showbiz 411 writes, "If you didn't know better, you'd swear it was Town & Country." He goes on to call the accompanying story "a nice People kind of cover, with no revelations." Of course it doesn't. Why should VF make news when it hasn't managed to do that in years under editor Radhika Jones? Even when Jones has tried to capture the zeitgeist — most recently, with last month's cover featuring an illustration of the late Breonna Taylor — she doesn't quite pull it off, well-meaning as she may be. (Hearst's O, The Oprah Magazine had already done a Taylor homage, and a better one, months before. Meanwhile, on social media, VF's cover provoked pushback about the media's "commoditization" of Taylor.) And yet one more cover down in this painful gallery of failure, we are left to wonder what this once-great magazine could've been had former Hollywood Reporter editor Janice Min been tapped to fill Graydon Carter's shoes instead of a book editor from the Times. Anna, are you listening?

Patagonia's Political Call to Action Masks the Lefty Brand's Cozy Relationship With the U.S. Military

It's the kind of media attention money can't buy. Everybody's talking about Patagonia's hidden political message on the backside of a tag sewn into a pair of shorts, imploring customers to "Vote the Assholes Out." It's even become a trending topic on Twitter — what brand wouldn't want that kind of free advertising? Activism is, of course, nothing new for this popular marketer of outerwear, which has made headlines for giving a $10 million tax cut to environmental programs and for closing up shop on Election Day. Every news outlet from CNN to NBC, Yahoo, Vogue and People magazine carried approving stories on the company's clever clothing-tag stunt, but the conservative publication National Review was the sole news org I could find that put a spotlight on the lefty brand's surprising hypocrisy. 

While it gets loads of press and the praise of devoted fans because of its p.c. bona fides, National Review reports that Patagonia also happens to be a longtime contractor for the U.S. Department of Defense, noting that the company has an entire team dedicated to furnishing our fighting men and women with cold-weather and combat uniforms. As the magazine's Jim Geraghty writes, "Most people will have no problem with Patagonia developing and selling [products to] the U.S. military. Then again, some of Patagonia's more stridently liberal customers, who see the U.S. military as an inherently imperialistic or destructive force, might not see the company's military contracts as a sin that they can excuse or forgive." 

Count me among those stridently liberal customers, someone who happens to be a fan of Patagonia who proudly buys and wears its products, in no small part because I so admire its politics. As such, I say let Columbia or Marmot or Carhartt or The North Face supply our soldiers with their apparel. Now, nobody wants our soldiers to get frostbite, of course. And National Review's report makes a pretty broad leap in suggesting that if you're a liberal you're against the troops. (I am a liberal and I am not anti-military.) But strictly regarding brand equity and brand reputation, Patagonia has been far too successful building an image as a socially responsible company to risk pissing off its core customers. You cannot serve two masters, as the commandment goes. Finding out Patagonia is in bed with the Pentagon is like hearing Ben & Jerry's is the official ice cream of Fox News. 

Here's the thing. I believe our armed forces deserve the very best supplies there are — I just don't believe such a famously progressive company with such a devoted following on the left should be doing the supplying. 

Oh, and one more thing: Vote the Assholes Out.

Target Latest Company to Make C-Suite More Diverse

Target is going beyond just paying lip service to diversifying its upper ranks. Today, Maurice Cooper starts at the Minneapolis-based retail chain as senior VP of marketing, where he will lead brand, category and promotional marketing efforts across paid, owned and shared media and oversee key campaigns including those around the all-important holiday shopping season. Previously, Cooper was exec VP, chief growth & experience officer at the fast-casual chain Wingstop and also served in brand marketing positions at The Coca-Cola Co. and Intercontinental Hotels Group. Target is just the latest company to make its C-suite more diverse. Another is Boeing, which last week appointed Ed Dandridge to senior VP, chief communications officer. Dandridge previously was global chief marketing and communications officer at the insurance giant AIG. Target and Boeing follow companies such as Apple, Nike and Netflix making high-profile minority hires in recent weeks, each putting its money where its mouth is when it comes to assigning minorities to C-suite roles. The trend is long overdue, and the recent promotions are but a drop in the bucket when it comes to the leadership of American business. As USA Today recently reported, among 279 senior positions at the top 50 companies in the S&P 100, only 5 are held by Black people — and 2 of those recently retired. While many companies rushed to issue statements of support to the Black community following the May 25 killing of George Floyd, they clearly have a long way to go when it comes to making their boardrooms more accurately reflect their employee ranks and the customers they serve. 

Wish You Were Here

#rip #wtc #911

The "Brand With Balls Award" Goes to Krispy Kreme

The award for the brand with the biggest balls of 2020 has to go to Krispy Kreme, which, even though Manhattan remains all but emptied because of COVID-19, still plans next week to open its flagship store in Times Square, normally one of the busiest neighborhoods in the world but where foot traffic is but one-tenth of what it was a year ago. (Although it should be pointed out that, even if it had wanted to pull out of the storefront, it probably couldn't have, as New York landlords have been particularly hard on retailers seeking to modify their leases during the pandemic. But, we'll still give 'em props for hanging in there.) There are features of the new Krispy Kreme store, as CNN reports, that we won't likely get to enjoy for some time — like the stadium seating in a giant doughnut box. And with the city still straining to get back to normal-ish, there probably won't be the once-anticipated mile-long lines around the corner on opening day, a phenomenon that, you may recall, greeted such Middle American chains as Chick-fil-A and Arby's when they swung open the doors of their first NYC outposts. But just think: a year from now, after we've all been vaccinated, the coronavirus is a distant, hideous memory and President Biden has reestablished the White House pandemic response team so we never find ourselves in quite this deep a pile again, we'll all be scarfing down those hot-off-the-conveyer-belt balls of sugary dough on our way over to a Broadway show. Ah, to dream ...

On Books, Beaches, Diversity and Andrew Sullivan — Or, What I Did (and Didn't Do) on My Summer Vacation

Andrew Sullivan: 90s pinup

Followers of ToAM (hellllllooooo? Is there anybody out there still?) can see I took most of the summer off from posting content here. Not that there hasn't been anything going on in media and marketing — it's just that, considering the bleak state of the world and the need to mind my own mental health first, I had to shut it down for a while. Took a road trip down South and a handful of trips to P-town and other sandy points dotting New England, finally finished up a couple of books staring at me from my nightstand for too long — oldies like Joan Didion's "The White Album" and Rex Reed's irresistibly titled "Do You Sleep in the Nude?" as well as newbies like my friends Chris Freeman and Jim Berg's latest collection of essays on Isherwood, Andre Leon Talley's takedown of Anna Wintour and comic Judy Gold's book about free speech. That, and redecorating my home/office about a dozen times because, well, if I have to look at that old poster from the David Hockey exhibit at the Met one ... more ... minute ... . Oh, yes, and there's been work, mostly on behalf of companies scrambling to figure out how to communicate to the world that they're still alive even while nobody's paying attention. It's not as if the business has been asleep in the middle of our hunkering down, you know. 

The headline of the summer: Corporations, including some of the world's mightiest, have been scrambling in the age of #BLM and #MeToo to put Black people and women in more senior and visible positions — most recently Citi, which just promoted chief brand officer Carla Hassan to CMO in charge of the newly merged marketing and branding division, and Amazon, which installed Ukonwa Ojo as CMO of Prime Video and Amazon Studios. For years, media and marketing companies have pretty much played lip service to the concept of diversity. I was hired about a year ago to conduct several interviews with the head of diversity for a major ad agency with the aim of developing some external content around the topic. In the scheme of things, a well-placed feature or opinion piece here or there would've been at least been something, I suppose, but also kind of like trying to put out a Cali wildfire with a bottle of Saratoga spring water. That project, as it turned out, was shelved as the agency began to prioritize other fires. Not that I was the least bit surprised. I've been writing about diversity in this business for as long as I've been writing about the business — quite a long time — and only in 2020, because of a movement that began with the criminal murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor at the hands of cops, did anything really start to change. As someone who started his career writing about the business of newspapers (you remember those), I can attest that sometimes it takes the dinosaurs a while to wake up. 

Speaking of dinosaurs, Andrew Sullivan has been the topic of conversation this summer that, try as I might, I simply cannot seem to escape. Going back again to my beginnings as a media writer, I recall idolizing Sullivan when he was the brainy, cuter-than-a-button editor of The New Republic. Posing for Gap ads, putting out a magazine that was a must-read among the kvetching sets of New York and D.C., defending gay rights and gay marriage with clinical precision and unrelenting ferocity — and a British accent to boot — what writer didn't want to be him (or be with him) back in the 90s? Then he got sidetracked into racial politics and was branded a racist himself and this summer he got fired from his lofty perch at New York magazine because of it and, well, the whole Andrew Sullivan Show just became so tiresome. He managed to lose me and a lot of other people along the way. As the headline of Ben Smith's recent Times piece on Sullivan put it: "I'm Still Reading Andrew Sullivan. But I Can't Defend Him." The only difference is, unlike Smith, I do not read him anymore. It's not because I don't consume content put out by people I disagree with — I do. Fran Lebowitz once commented that she doesn't understand liberals who watch only MSNBC and read only the Times. "I watch Fox News," she said. "And believe me, it's much worse than you think." Sullivan is as beautiful a writer and as sharp an observer of politics, history and the culture as he ever was, in spite of my objections about much of his worldview. It's like that line from Woody Allen's "Husbands and Wives," wherein the college student (played by Juliette Lewis) explains to her professor (Allen) why she objects to his latest novel due to its overall retrograde views toward women: "We're not arguing about whether it's brilliant or not. 'Triumph of the Will' was a great movie but you despise the ideas behind it." (A prescient line considering the details of Allen's own life as we've come to know them the past few decades.) I say the more content the better in what's left of this hulking old hunk of mud that used to be called a democracy. But frankly, there's just too much to read. And while I wholeheartedly support paying for content (including Sullivan's newsletter, "The Weekly Dish," which charges readers 50 bucks a year), I have too many online newspaper and magazine subscriptions and streaming services to pony up for on a freelancer's pay as it is. Besides, in the case of Andrew Sullivan, I figure I have any number of alternative ways to become enraged for free. 

And yet, it all makes me wonder ... would you subscribe to ToAM were you to be forced to pay for the pleasure? 

Wheels spinning ... wheels spinning ...