Variety (magazine)
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Variety is a daily magazine for the entertainment industry. It has been published since 1905, starting by covering vaudeville with offices in New York, then opening a Los Angeles bureau in the 1930s.
It publishes three editions (four if you include the Web site). Variety is a tabloid-sized glossy newspaper published weekly and is delivered nationally and internationally with a broad coverage of movies, television, theater, music, and technology, written for entertainment executives. Daily Variety is the name of the Los Angeles, California-based Hollywood and Broadway daily newspaper. Daily Variety Gotham, started in 1998, is the name of the New York City-version of the newspaper. This edition gives a priority focus to Eastern show business news and is produced earlier in the evening than the Los Angeles version so it can be delivered to New York offices the following morning.
A significant portion of Variety's revenue comes during the movie award season leading up to the Academy Awards. During this time, large numbers of colorful, full-page "For Your Consideration" ads inflate the size of Variety to double or triple its usual page count. These ads are Hollywood's attempt to reach other Hollywood professionals who will be voting in the many awards given out in the early part of the year.
For much of its existence, Variety's writers and columnists have used a jargon that refers especially to the movie industry, and has largely been adopted and imitated by other writers in the industry. Such terms as "boffo box-office biz," "sitcom," and "sex appeal" are attributed to the influence of the magazine, though its attempt to popularize "infobahn" as a synonym for "information superhighway" never caught on.
Its most famous headline, "Sticks Nix Hick Pix" is an example of what it calls slanguage (http://www.variety.com/slanguage). Translated it means that rural audiences were not attending rural-themed films. Its headline after the stock market crash of 1929 is also famous: "Wall St. Lays An Egg".
The magazine is owned by Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier, Inc. Its editor-in-chief is Peter Bart, who worked previously at Paramount Studios and the New York Times.
The Internet version of Variety is Variety.com, and it was one of the first online newspapers to charge for access when it launched in 1998.
External links
- Variety.com website (http://www.variety.com/)
- Variety's slanguage dictionary (http://www.variety.com/slanguage)
- Variety's self-described history (http://www.variety.com/index.asp?layout=about_history_layout)