The Hollywood Reporter Gets a Facelift
Today The Hollywood Reporter unveils its new face with a comprehensive redesign of its print and online properties, and a renewed focus on leveraging the numerous data sources of its Nielsen Co. brethren, including: Nielsen EDI, Nielsen Mobile, Net Ratings and SoundScan.
Backed by key partners within The Nielsen Company, such as Nielsen EDI, the comprehensive changes we are introducing — from cover to content to approach — reflect the changing needs of our audience and will allow us to drive the discussion about the business of entertainment for the 21st century. […] The transformation is devised to uniquely position THR to super serve a wider range of today’s global entertainment markets, which are increasingly technology-savvy and data-driven
Beyond the digital makeover (the second in 18 months), the effort marks an important strategic shift focused more on addressing the business of Hollywood, which remains one of the nation’s largest and most powerful exports. “None of the publications to date really represent that. It reaches out to the finance [and] technology community,” says publisher Eric Mika “but it does not forget the core readership on Wilshire Blvd., New York City and London.”
The new web strategy will introduce four new video channels (Boxoffice Tally, News, Exclusive Interviews, and Festival Dailies), a dedicated technology section, and a new daily blog dubbed “Hollywood Live Feed”.
Clearly, and to their credit, The Hollywood Reporter has seen the writing on the wall: as general “bread and butter” entertainment news has increasingly become a staple of the blogosphere (which frequently does a better job with it anyway), its premium value has diminished considerably, if not entirely. There is far more value in delivering insightful, business-driven analysis targeted to a community which has already been trained to pay for such information. As with the WSJ, Mika acknowledged “once we have enough real exclusive data … that sort of area will go behind the wall.”
[via PaidContent]
