Variety (magazine)

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Variety was born from an act of defiance. In 1905, Sime Silverman lost his job at The Morning Telegraph for panning an act that had paid $50 for an advertisement. He borrowed $1,500 from his father-in-law and launched his own publication, pledging it would "not be influenced by advertising." That first issue, dated the 16th of December 1905, sold 320 copies. Over the next 120 years, the trade paper Silverman founded to cover theater and vaudeville would become the defining record of the American entertainment industry. How did a scrappy weekly newspaper outlast the industries it covered, survive multiple ownership changes, and invent a language adopted by journalists worldwide? The answers lie in the decisions made by the Silverman family, the editors who followed them, and an institution that proved more durable than any single medium it reported on.

• 2. The Silverman Dynasty

  ›

  Sime Silverman ran Variety not merely as a publisher but as a patriarch. The original front cover of the first issue featured portraits of the editorial staff, and the first review was written by his son Sidne, then seven years old, billed as the youngest critic in the world. The two-generation bond between Silverman and the publication was that close from day one.

  In 1922, Silverman acquired The New York Clipper, which had covered entertainment since 1853, spending $100,000 before folding it two years later and absorbing select features into Variety. He also briefly launched a paper he himself called "the world's worst daily" and scrapped it just as quickly. None of these experiments derailed the core publication.

  When Silverman died in 1933, his son Sidne took over, but tuberculosis forced him to step back by 1936. Editor Abel Green and treasurer Harold Erichs ran the operation during Sidne's illness. After Sidne died in 1950, his only son Syd Silverman inherited the company. Erichs, who had started at Variety as an office boy, became president as Syd's legal guardian. Syd would go on to manage both the Weekly Variety in New York and the Daily Variety in Hollywood after Erichs stepped aside in 1956, holding the publisher role until 1990. The Silverman family's grip on Variety spanned three generations before the company sold in 1987 for $64 million to Cahners Publishing.

• 3. Daily Variety and Los Angeles

  ›

  After The Hollywood Reporter launched in 1930, Variety recognized it needed a West Coast presence. Sime Silverman responded in 1933 by launching Daily Variety in Los Angeles, with Arthur Ungar as its founding editor. The new paper initially ran every day except Sunday and operated as a near-separate newspaper from the Weekly, with the Daily focused on Hollywood news and the Weekly handling broader U.S. and international coverage.

  Army Archerd joined Daily Variety's page two column, "Just for Variety," in 1953 and held it for 52 years until the 1st of September 2005. He broke exclusive stories from film sets, reported on deals and star hospitalizations, and became a fixture in Hollywood life. Thomas M. Pryor, the former Hollywood bureau chief of The New York Times, replaced editor Joe Schoenfeld in 1959 and expanded the paper from 8 pages to 32 pages while growing circulation from 8,000 to 22,000 readers.

  The Daily Variety building at 1400 North Cahuenga Boulevard, purchased by Syd Silverman in 1972, housed the paper until 1988. Daily Variety's last printed edition appeared on the 19th of March 2013, bearing the headline "Variety Ankles Daily Pub Hubbub," after new owner Penske Media Corporation chose to consolidate around the weekly print edition and the website. The Daily Variety brand returned in 2019 as a Monday-through-Friday email newsletter.

• 4. The Language of Show Business

  ›

  One of the stranger legacies of Variety's early decades is linguistic. The writers developed a trade slang called "slanguage" or "Varietyese," a compressed form of headlinese shaped by the speech patterns of theater performers. Three words attributed to the magazine's invention are "boffo," "payola," and "striptease."

  In 1934, founder Sime Silverman was listed in Time magazine among the "ten modern Americans who have done most to keep American jargon alive." The headline "Sticks Nix Hick Pix," which Variety published to convey that rural audiences were rejecting rural-themed films, became so iconic that a version of it was reproduced as a movie prop in the 1942 musical film Yankee Doodle Dandy. During the Wall Street Crash of 1929, Variety ran the headline "Wall St. Lays An Egg."

  According to The Boston Globe, the Oxford English Dictionary credits Variety as the earliest recorded source for about two dozen terms, including "show biz," which it traces to 1945. A 2005 book, The Hollywood Dictionary by Timothy M. Gray and J. C. Suares, defines nearly 200 of these terms. By 2013, Variety staffers had counted more than 200 references to Weekly or Daily Variety in television shows and films, from I Love Lucy to Entourage.

• 5. Film Reviews and Box Office Data

  ›

  On the 19th of January 1907, Variety published what is considered the first film review in history. Two reviews appeared that day, both written by Sime Silverman: one for Pathe's comedy short An Exciting Honeymoon and one for Edwin S. Porter's western short The Life of a Cowboy, produced by Edison Studios. The publication briefly stopped running film reviews between March 1911 and January 1913, persuaded by a producer believed to be George Kleine that it was wasting space. Despite that gap, Variety holds the record as the longest unbroken source of film criticism in existence.

  The paper began tracking box office grosses by theater on the 3rd of March 1922, initially focusing on Broadway and ten additional cities including Chicago and Los Angeles. In 1946, a weekly National Box Office Survey appeared on page 3, measuring the performance of key films based on results from 25 U.S. cities. That same year, Variety published its first All-Time Top Grossers list, covering films that had earned or were projected to earn $4,000,000 or more in domestic rentals.

  In the late 1960s, Variety began using an IBM 360 computer to compile grosses from 22 to 24 cities starting on the 1st of January 1968. The data drew from up to 800 theaters, representing roughly 5% of U.S. cinema locations but approximately one-third of total domestic box office. The resulting weekly Top 50 chart debuted with "The Love Bug" at number one for the week ending the 16th of April 1969. Arthur D. Murphy, who joined Variety in 1964 and worked there until 1993, developed the methodology for estimating total weekly U.S. box office from sample data, a standard that shaped how the industry reports those figures today.

• 6. Ownership and the Digital Era

  ›

  Variety changed hands from the Silverman family to Cahners Publishing in 1987 for $64 million. Cahners itself was part of the Reed-Elsevier publishing group. In October 2012, Reed Business Information sold Variety to Penske Media Corporation, whose other properties include Deadline Hollywood, long considered Variety's primary competitor in online entertainment news since the 2007-2008 Writers Guild of America strike.

  Jay Penske, chairman and CEO of PMC, announced at a townhall in October 2012 that the website's paywall would come down and investment in the digital platform would increase. The website, Variety.com, had launched in 1998 as one of the first online newspapers to charge for access. A full paywall was activated in June 2010 before being removed in April 2013; subscription access to archives continued after that. As of the early 2020s, Variety.com draws 32 million unique monthly visitors, and paid print circulation for the weekly magazine stood at 85,300 in 2023, with an estimated total readership of 255,900 based on an average of three readers per copy.

  PMC appointed three co-editors in March 2013 to oversee film, television, and digital coverage. That same year, PMC announced plans to move Variety's offices to 11175 Santa Monica Boulevard in Westwood, where the publication shares space with Rolling Stone, Billboard, Deadline.com, and other PMC properties. In 2016, for the first time in its 111-year history, Variety endorsed a candidate for elected office, naming Hillary Clinton its choice for President of the United States.

• 7. Editions and Expansion

  ›

  From a single weekly newspaper in New York, Variety grew into a family of publications and platforms. Daily Variety Gotham launched in 1998 as the New York edition of the daily paper, produced earlier in the evening so copies could reach the city by morning. Variety.com also launched in 1998 and remains the digital flagship, available as a mobile app called Variety On-The-Go.

  Variety Hitmakers, the publication's first dedicated music franchise, debuted in November 2017. Its inaugural issue recognized songwriters, producers, and other behind-the-scenes personnel, with Kendrick Lamar named Hitmaker of the Year and featured on one of three individual covers alongside DJ Khaled and Scooter Braun. Hailee Steinfeld and Khaled were honored at the first Hitmakers ceremony that same month. Subsequent years recognized BTS as 2019 Group of the Year and Harry Styles as 2020 Hitmaker of the Year.

  In June 2014, Variety launched a real-estate breaking news site called Dirt, which expanded into a stand-alone site in 2019. That same month, PMC entered into a deal with Reuters to syndicate Variety and Variety Latino content to the international news agency's global readership. Variety Studio: Actors on Actors, a co-production with PBS SoCal that premiered in November 2014, went on to win three Emmy awards, including a Daytime Creative Arts Award in May 2019. The most recent international expansion came with Variety India, launched on the 1st of February 2026 and owned by Thursday Tales Pvt. Ltd.