During my time as a financial reporter, a word I learned to loathe above all others was "synergy." It's such a gentle and vague word, and business executives love it because it can mean almost anything. Even better, it can be used instead of phrases that have a less pleasant connotation.
For instance, when a larger company buys a rival, there is inevitably a lot of talk about "synergistic savings." Which is a nice way of saying "massive layoffs and cost savings for everyone who isn't a key executive." CEO's love to talk about the savings this famed synergy will bring. But inevitably they struggle to actually define what that might mean. Other than being able to acquire their smaller rival and strip it of its valuable parts as if it were a stolen sports car.
Another common use of the word synergy - and this is the one that matters in this story - is when executives talk about acquiring multiple businesses in a specific vertical market. There is a great deal of talk claiming this is happening to take advantage of "market efficiencies" and "synergistic opportunities." But what synergy really means in this case is consolidating enough market power in order to create a near monopoly that allows you to dominate advertising while simultaneously squeezing the nuts of anyone trying to compete against you.
If you're talking about the Hollywood entertainment press, the chief nut squeezer is Jay Penske's Penske Media Corporation, which in the past 15 years has rolled up an impressively evil collection of iconic Hollywood entertainment news outlets.
Thanks to a combination of money from private equity, hedge funds and a Saudi Investment fund, PMC has done what most investment fund supported businesses do when confronted with a vertical business niche that has a lot of undervalued and/or undercapitalized companies. It rolled them up into one massive co-mingled near monopoly in hopes of giving it leverage over its customers. Which in this case means the studios and their still-substantial advertising budgets.
So now PMC owns (or controls through the partnership Penske Media Eldridge) Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, Deadline, TV Line, Rolling Stone, Vibe, IndieWire, Gold Derby and a raft of smaller publications. It also owns an increasingly large portfolio of live events, including SXSW and ATX TV.
Through PME, it owns Dick Clark Productions (DCP), which operates the American Music Awards, Billboard Music Awards, The Academy of Country Music Awards and the internet-focused Streamy Awards. DCP also produces the Fox series So You Think You Can Dance.
All of these assets together provide PMC with an unsettling amount of leverage in the industry. Editorially, they use their weight to wrestle exclusive stories from rivals and offer impossible-to-ignore invitations to stars for their live events. They aggressively pursue studio advertising, especially for the lucrative FYC ads which dominate entertainment news sites during awards season.
No matter what the industry, one thing market dominance does is to encourage the market leader to see everything as a sales opportunity. If you have the outlets and the sales staff, then the biggest barrier to growing revenue is finding new markets to monetize and promote.
Which brings us to The Golden Globes, an awards program that only still exists to be another part of the Penske Media Corporation sales flywheel.
To call the Golden Globes a troubled awards show is a bit like saying Twitter has had some management issues. The Golden Globes were founded by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association (HFPA), an organization that in theory represented international journalists who reported on the American entertainment industry.
But since the 1950s, the reality was that the HFPA were a small group of mostly white critics who seemed to exist primarily to use their position to grift the studios. These often part-time critics were frequently accused of voting for whichever studio or production treated them the best.
By the late 1960s, advertisers apparently tied their ad buys to the guarantee that the stars would show up for the event. The HFPA made sure that happened by threatening to give the award to the runner-up if the winner didn't make an appearance. That scandal led to the Golden Globes being off of TV for five years.
In 1982, CBS backed out of airing the Globes after the billionaire husband of Pia Zadora essentially bought her win for "New Movie Star Of The Year." Which was pretty impressive for a movie that received terrible reviews and hadn't even officially opened in theaters when the award was presented.
But despite the continuing allegations of payola and petty grifting, the Golden Globes didn't face a true reckoning until several years ago, when demands for change kept the Globes off the air once again. Why did it take nearly 70 years to bring about an attempted change? Because studios were more than willing to spend some money if it generated some helpful marketing ahead of the Academy Awards. The Golden Globes were the awards show equivalent of those local TV broadcast critics who live their pull quote describing Paul Blart Mall Cop 2 as "the funniest comedy of the decade." The Globes might have been corrupt, but they were also good for business.
In June 2022, the HFPA approved a reorganization that sold the Golden Globes to the PME-owned Dick Clark Productions. Which brings us back to the Penske Media circle of life.
Nominations for this year's "revitalized" Golden Globes were announced and you will not be shocked to learn that the various Penske-owned outlets are proclaiming the Globes are back, not at all sketchy and more influential than ever.
At IndieWire, Anne Thompson opens by reminding readers that the "new" Golden Globes are now trustworthy because there are new diverse members who shall not be named:
Remember: it’s no longer the Hollywood Foreign Press. Much of that idiosyncratic group of 90 mostly white Hollywood correspondents is buried inside a new diverse list of 300 voters from 75 countries, 60 percent people of color. And most of them, unlike the core of international entertainment reporters based in Hollywood, are bonafide film critics. (What’s left of the original HFPA members draw a $75,000 annual salary; the rest do not.)
Now, while the press conferences dreaded by talent are no more, Globe members in New York, L.A., and London are happily getting invites to FYC events again. (The Golden Globes are owned by Dick Clark Productions and Eldridge. IndieWire‘s parent company, Penske Media, subsequently acquired Dick Clark Productions in a joint venture with Eldridge.)
And over at sister outlet Variety is reminding readers that "Hey, did you hear those Golden Globe Awards might have an impact on the Oscars?" And in case the headline isn't enough of a ballpeen hammer to the forehead:
Here is the opening sentence of the piece:
The Oscar race is coming into focus with the Golden Globes nominations.
The Variety piece also includes a disclaimer, albeit a shorter one than at IndieWire and located at the very bottom of the story:
Variety parent company PMC owns Dick Clark Prods. in a joint venture with Eldridge.
The Hollywood Reporter takes a different approach, spending most of its primary Globes article trying to draw trends from the nominations, while also framing the organization's previous moral failings as barely worth mentioning:
The Golden Globes have always been weird. Before a Los Angeles Times exposé on its very white, very small and allegedly morally questionable voting body briefly had it fall out of favor, the Golden Globe Awards and the Hollywood Foreign Press Association hosted the quirky kudos best known for their starry, intimate and incredibly well-timed party. Its place on the awards calendar, particularly in relation to the Oscar race, made it relevant simply for the attention it received. A Golden Globe nomination meant and still means at least a little momentum for many hopefuls by its sheer proximity to other voting windows, even if the sanctity of the award itself has never been held in the highest regard.
But luckily, those shady times are over, because the Globes have new, super-trustworthy owners:
Over the last nine months, the show has endured an unprecedented makeover. The group of international journalists who vote for the Golden Globes grew to 300 individuals in October. The embattled HFPA no longer oversees the ceremony, as the show is now owned by producers Dick Clark Productions, which is owned by Penske Media Eldridge, the joint venture between Penske Media Corporation and Eldridge that also owns The Hollywood Reporter. Come Jan. 7, the show won’t air on its longtime home of NBC but on CBS — per a new broadcast contract. The Golden Globes, as we knew them, are dead.
Whew, that's a relief.
And in case you had any questions about any aspect of this year's Golden Globes nominations, Deadline posted a staggering *16* pieces in a 15-hour period today about every aspect of the nominations.
And that's what we have to look forward to with this year's Golden Globes. An endless succession of vaguely news-adjacent content created to maximize the show's worth to advertisers and indirectly to Penske Media.
There was no real reason to save the Golden Globes other than for the sales and promotional possibilities. And with PMC now running things, we've just consolidated all of that individual grifting into one well-oiled sales funnel.
Enjoy the show!
