“There are too many voices in this conversation now,” another blogger said to me at an awards-season party last week. But what’s most interesting isn’t the number of voices, but the changes in how those voices are talking, and where they’re coming from.
In recent days and weeks, the Los Angeles Times, the Hollywood Reporter, Deadline.com, indieWIRE and Gold Derby have made changes in the way they cover awards season. We’ve seen job-hopping, relaunches, consolidation, new ventures and scrambling for the Oscar ad dollars that are crucial to so many in entertainment journalism.
Deadline found a new blogger and is looking to print; the L.A. Times lost a blogger and a licensed site, added two staffers and is refocusing its awards efforts; the Hollywood Reporter is on the verge of a new look and a new approach.
Here’s a look at what’s going on, and how it could affect the awards picture this Oscar season.
Deadline gets nicer.
THE STORY: Nikki Finke's Deadline.com made a move that set others in motion in September when it hired Pete Hammond away from the Los Angeles Times’ awards site, The Envelope, where he had been writing the “Notes on a Season” column for years.
The move, which gave the snarkiest website in Hollywood the least snarky man in the Oscar game, was widely seen as a ploy to make potential advertisers feel more comfortable with a site that in the past often wasted no opportunity to savage the Academy and the Oscars. (To be fair, the change had started when Oscar-ad season rolled around about a year ago, when Finke abruptly went from routinely railing at AMPAS to running its press releases verbatim and without comment.)
And in another indication that Oscar ad dollars are a priority, Deadline last week announced that it’ll be doing five print supplements during awards season, all going directly (and exclusively) to Academy members. It’s the first time the site has attempted to have any kind of presence in print – and as the prospective audience makes clear, the whole thing is designed for one reason: to coax studios and Oscar campaigners into paying presumably steep prices to feature their “for your considerations” in a product that will go directly to AMPAS members, including some who might not be going online.
IMPACT ON AWARDS COVERAGE: Hammond is well-connected and well-liked, and has always been a significant voice in awards coverage. He may not be as well liked after a season of playing by Deadline’s more aggressive rules, but chances are we won’t see him succumbing to snark: this is a guy, after all, who in his awards coverage resolutely refrains from ever giving his opinion on the movies he’s writing about (although in his Boxoffice Magazine reviews, he’s known for loving everything).
But will his presence be enough to make advertisers overlook the tone of the site in general, and will the print specials have any impact? To the first question, I’d say that given Finke’s own softening tone, he’ll may make Deadline a bit more ad-friendly; as for the print edition, the center of gravity in entertainment journalism has shifted so decisively to the web that it will likely be no more than an afterthought, albeit one that might bring in a few more bucks.
